A novel approach for solving travelling thief problem using enhanced simulated annealing

Abstract

Real-world optimization problems are getting more and more complex due to the involvement of inter dependencies. These complex problems need more advanced optimizing techniques. The Traveling Thief Problem (TTP) is an optimization problem that combines two well-known NP-Hard problems including the 0/1 knapsack problem and traveling salesman problem. TTP contains a person known as a thief who plans a tour to collect multiple items to fill his knapsack to gain maximum profit while incurring minimum cost in a standard time interval of 600 s. This paper proposed an efficient technique to solve the TTP problem by rearranging the steps of the knapsack. Initially, the picking strategy starts randomly and then a traversal plan is generated through the Lin-Kernighan heuristic. This traversal is then improved by eliminating the insignificant cities which contribute towards profit adversely by applying the modified simulated annealing technique. The proposed technique on different instances shows promising results as compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms. This technique has outperformed on a small and medium-size instance and competitive results have been obtained in the context of relatively larger instances.