Solving the stochastic team orienteering problem: comparing simheuristics with the sample average approximation method

The team orienteering problem (TOP) is an NP-hard optimization problem with an increasing number of potential applications in smart cities, humanitarian logistics, wildfire surveillance, etc. In the TOP, a fixed fleet of vehicles is employed to obtain rewards by visiting nodes in a network. All vehi...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Panadero, Javier, Juan , Ángel A., Ghorbani, Elnaz, Faulin, Javier, Pagès Bernaus, Adela
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repositorio:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:10459.1/463349
Acceso en línea:https://doi.org/10.1111/itor.13302
https://hdl.handle.net/10459.1/463349
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Team orienteering problem
Random travel times
Biased-randomized algorithms
Simheuristics
Sample average approximation
Descripción
Sumario:The team orienteering problem (TOP) is an NP-hard optimization problem with an increasing number of potential applications in smart cities, humanitarian logistics, wildfire surveillance, etc. In the TOP, a fixed fleet of vehicles is employed to obtain rewards by visiting nodes in a network. All vehicles share common origin and destination locations. Since each vehicle has a limitation in time or traveling distance, not all nodes in the network can be visited. Hence, the goal is focused on the maximization of the collected reward, taking into account the aforementioned constraints. Most of the existing literature on the TOP focuses on its deterministic version, where rewards and travel times are assumed to be predefined values. This paper focuses on a more realistic TOP version, where travel times are modeled as random variables, which introduces reliability issues in the solutions due to the route-length constraint. In order to deal with these complexities, we propose a simheuristic algorithm that hybridizes biased-randomized heuristics with a variable neighborhood search and MCS. To test the quality of the solutions generated by the proposed simheuristic approach, we employ the well-known sample average approximation (SAA) method, as well as a combination model that hybridizes the metaheuristic used in the simheuristic approach with the SAA algorithm. The results show that our proposed simheuristic outperforms the SAA and the hybrid model both on the objective function values and computational time.