A Randomized Population Constructive Heuristic for the Team Orienteering Problem

The NP-hard (complete) team orienteering problem is a particular vehicle routing problem with the aim of maximizing the profits gained from visiting control points without exceeding a travel cost limit. The team orienteering problem has a number of applications in several fields such as athlete recruiting, technician routing and tourist trip. Therefore, solving optimally the team orienteering problem would play a major role in logistic management. In this study, a novel randomized population constructive heuristic is introduced. This heuristic constructs a diversified initial population for population-based metaheuristics. The heuristics proved its efficiency. Indeed, experiments conducted on the well-known benchmarks of the team orienteering problem show that the initial population constructed by the presented heuristic wraps the best-known solution for 131 benchmarks and good solutions for a great number of benchmarks.