Article ID: | iaor20091265 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 54 |
Issue: | 3 |
Start Page Number: | 648 |
End Page Number: | 665 |
Publication Date: | Apr 2008 |
Journal: | Computers & Industrial Engineering |
Authors: | Archetti Claudia, Feng Zuren, Ke Liangjun |
Keywords: | heuristics: ant systems, programming: travelling salesman |
The team orienteering problem involves finding a set of paths from the starting point to the ending point such that the total collected reward received from visiting a subset of locations is maximized and the length of each path is restricted by a pre-specified limit. In this paper, an ant colony optimization (ACO) approach is proposed for the team orienteering problem. Four methods, i.e., the sequential, deterministic-concurrent and random-concurrent and simultaneous methods, are proposed to construct candidate solutions in the framework of ACO. We compare these methods according to the results obtained on well-known problems from the literature. Finally, we compare the algorithm with several existing algorithms. The results show that our algorithm is promising.