• Management Science and Financial Engineering
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.79-94
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• 2011

Team orienteering, an extension of single-competitor orienteering, is the problem of determining multiple paths from a starting node to a finishing node for a given allowed time or distance limit fixed for each of the paths with the objective of maximizing the total collected score. Each path is through a subset of nodes, each of which has an associated score. The team orienteering problem has many applications such as home fuel delivery, college football players recruiting, service technicians scheduling, military operations, etc. Unlike existing optimal and heuristic algorithms often leading to heavy computation, this paper suggests two types of priority rule based heuristics-serial and parallel ones-that are especially suitable for practically large-sized problems. In the proposed heuristics, all nodes are listed in an order using a priority rule and then the paths are constructed according to this order. To show the performances of the heuristics, computational experiments were done on the small-to-medium sized benchmark instances and randomly generated large sized test instances, and the results show that some of the heuristics give reasonable quality solutions within very short computation time.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.198-206
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• 2013

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.