A fast solution method for the time-dependent orienteering problem

Abstract

This paper introduces a fast solution procedure to solve 100-node instances of the time-dependent orienteering problem (TD-OP) within a few seconds of computation time. Orienteering problems occur in logistic situations were an optimal combination of locations needs to be selected and the routing between the selected locations needs to be optimized. In the time-dependent variant, the travel time between two locations depends on the departure time at the first location. Next to a mathematical formulation of the TD-OP, the main contribution of this paper is the design of a fast and effective algorithm to tackle this problem. This algorithm combines the principles of an ant colony system (ACS) with a time-dependent local search procedure equipped with a local evaluation metric. Additionally, realistic benchmark instances with varying size and properties are constructed. The average score gap with the known optimal solution on these test instances is only 1.4% with an average computation time of 0.5 seconds. An extensive sensitivity analysis shows that the performance of the algorithm is insensitive to small changes in its parameter settings.

Optimizing practical orienteering problems with stochastic time-dependent travel times: towards congestion free routes

“…Actually, this work was published after we published our research on the TD-OP [151], which we will discuss in Chapter 4. The former propose several clusterbased heuristics for the TD-TOP applied to tourist trip planning.…”

An Iterated Local Search Algorithm for Agile Earth Observation Satellite Scheduling Problem

“…This aspect is also known as the First-In-First-Out Rule (FIFO) in time-dependent scheduling [10]. Hence, when the observation start time of a task t j is given, the latest start time ls i of its preceding task t i can be calculated.…”

“…However, the "time slack" cannot be directly used to tackle the time-dependent scheduling problem. Based on an analysis of the time-dependent transition time, we improved their work and presented a local search algorithm coupled with a special insertion operator, inspired by work on the Time Dependent Orienteering Problem [10] [11]. We will use the same agile satellite AS-01 test instances to test the performance of our algorithm.…”

“…To handle the time-dependent transition time constraint efficiently, we refer to a local search insert procedure for the Time-Dependent Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TDOPTW) [10]. The concept of "maxshift", similar to "time slack", is defined as the maximum amount of time a visit can be postponed before the solution become infeasible.…”

The time-dependent orienteering problem with time windows: a fast ant colony system

“…In this case, this is modelled as a travel time function representing the travel time in function of the hour of the day. As thoroughly discussed in (Verbeeck et al, 2014), the time-dependent problem formulation allows to tackle congestion related issues in routing problems and multi-modal applications for logistic or tourist trip planners.…”