An efficient composite heuristic for the symmetric generalized traveling salesman problem

The main purpose of this paper is to introduce a new comnposite heuristic for solving the generalized traveling salesman problem. The proposed heuristic is composed of three phases: the construction of an initial partial solution, the insertion of a node from each non-visited node-subset, and a solution improvement phase. We show that the heuristic performs very well on 36 TSPLIB problems which have been solved to optimality by other researchers. We also propose some simple heuristics that can be used as basic blocks to construct more efficient composite heuristics.