Optimising Tours for the Weighted Traveling Salesperson Problem and the Traveling Thief Problem: A Structural Comparison of Solutions
This work addresses combinatorial optimization for researchers, but it is incremental as it compares existing problems without introducing new methods.
The paper compared the Weighted Traveling Salesperson Problem (W-TSP) and Traveling Thief Problem (TTP) by analyzing tour structures and fitness functions, finding that W-TSP solutions often improve with the TTP fitness function and that final solutions differ from optimal TSP or weighted greedy ones.
The Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is one of the best-known combinatorial optimisation problems. However, many real-world problems are composed of several interacting components. The Traveling Thief Problem (TTP) addresses such interactions by combining two combinatorial optimisation problems, namely the TSP and the Knapsack Problem (KP). Recently, a new problem called the node weight dependent Traveling Salesperson Problem (W-TSP) has been introduced where nodes have weights that influence the cost of the tour. In this paper, we compare W-TSP and TTP. We investigate the structure of the optimised tours for W-TSP and TTP and the impact of using each others fitness function. Our experimental results suggest (1) that the W-TSP often can be solved better using the TTP fitness function and (2) final W-TSP and TTP solutions show different distributions when compared with optimal TSP or weighted greedy solutions.