A tour construction heuristic for the travelling salesman problem

The tour construction heuristic that generates initial tours for the tour improvement heuristics plays an important role in solving the travelling salesman problem. With the help of an effective tour construction heuristic, the performance of a heuristic can be improved. In this study we present a new tour construction algorithm, the construction priority (CP). We incorporate the performance of the CP into metaheuristics such as tabu search, genetic algorithm, space smoothing, and noising methods. The performance of the CP is empirically compared with the nearest neighbour approach. Extensive computational comparison shows that the CP is considerably more effective compared to nearest neighbour.