Tabu search for solving the black-and-white travelling salesman problem

Abstract

The black-and-white travelling salesman problem (BWTSP) is an extension to the well-known TSP by partitioning the set of vertices into black and white vertices, and imposing cardinality and length constraints between two consecutive black vertices in a Hamiltonian tour. BWTSP has various applications in aircraft routing, telecommunication network design and logistics. In this paper, we develop several tabu search (TS) heuristics for solving the BWTSP. Our TS is built upon a new efficient neighbourhood structure, which exploits both the permutation and knapsack features of BWTSP. We also embed our TS as a heuristic procedure to improve the upper bound in a mixed-integer linear programming method. Extensive computational experiment on both benchmark and randomly generated instances shows effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms. Our algorithms are able to obtain optimal and near optimal solutions to small instances in seconds, and find feasible solutions to large instances that have not been solved by the existing methods in the literature.

Keywords:

• travelling salesman problem
• side constraints
• local search
• metaheuristics
• tabu search
• hybrid algorithm

Acknowledgements

Haitao Li's research is supported by the Thousand Talents Program of China. The authors also thank two anonymous referees for their valuable comments that help improve the contents and presentation of this paper.