Solving the Team Orienteering Problem with Particle Swarm Optimization

The team orienteering problem (TOP) or the multiple tour maximum collection problem can be considered as a generic model that can be applied to a number of challenging applications in logistics, tourism, and other fields. This problem is generally defined as the problem of determining P paths, in which the traveling time of each path is limited by $T_{max}$ that maximizes the total collected score. In the TOP, a set of N vertices i is given, each with a score $S_i$. The starting point (vertex 1) and the end point (vertex N) of all paths are fixed. The time $t_{ij}$ needed to travel from vertex i to j is known for all vertices. Some exact and heuristics approaches had been proposed in the past for solving the TOP. This paper proposes a new solution methodology for solving the TOP using the particle swarm optimization, especially by proposing a solution representation and its decoding method. The performance of the proposed algorithm is then evaluated using several benchmark datasets for the TOP. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm using specific settings is capable of finding good solution for the corresponding TOP instance.