Dynamic tabu search strategies for the traveling purchaser problem

Tabu search is a metastrategy for guiding known heuristics to overcome local optimality with a large number of successful applications reported in the literature. This paper investigates two dynamic strategies, the reverse elimination method and the cancellation sequence method. The incorporation of strategic oscillation as well as a combination of these methods are developed. The impact of the different methods is shown with respect to the traveling purchaser problem, a generalization of the classical traveling salesman problem. The traveling purchaser problem is the problem of determining a tour of a purchaser buying several items in different shops by minimizing the total amount of travel and purchase costs. A comparison of the tabu search strategies with a simulated annealing approach is presented, too.