Heterogeneous multiple traveling purchaser problem with budget constraint

In the last decade, traveling purchaser problem (TPP) has received some attention of the researchers in the operational research area. TPP is a generalization of the well-known traveling salesman problem (TSP), which has many real-world applications such as purchasing the required raw materials for the manufacturing factories and the scheduling of a set of jobs over some machines, and many others. In this paper we suggest heterogeneous multiple traveling purchaser problem with budget constraint (HMTPP-B) which looks for several cycles starting at and ending to the depot and visiting a subset at a minimum traveling cost and such that the demand for each product is satisfied and the cost spent for purchasing the products does not exceed a given budget threshold. All the past studies of TPP are restricted on a single purchaser. Therefore we randomly generated some instances. CPLEX is used for getting optimal solutions in these experiments.