An artificial bee colony algorithm with variable degree of perturbation for the generalized covering traveling salesman problem

Abstract

The generalized covering traveling salesman problem is a recently introduced variant of the traveling salesman problem. Given a set of cities that includes depot, facilities and customer cities, starting at the depot, the salesman has to visit a subset of facilities in order to cover some of the customers so that a constraint function based on customer coverage is satisfied. The goal is to minimize the total distance traveled by the salesman. A customer is covered if it is within a coverage radius r i of a facility i visited by the salesman. This problem finds important applications in humanitarian relief transportation and telecommunication networks. In this paper, we have proposed an artificial bee colony algorithm with variable degree of perturbation for this problem where the degree to which a solution is perturbed for generating its neighboring solution is reduced over iterations. Computational results on a wide range of benchmark instances and their analysis show the effectiveness of our proposed approach in comparison to other state-of-the-art approaches.