A Scatter Search Based Approach with Approximate Evaluation for the Heterogeneous Probabilistic Traveling Salesman Problem

This paper focuses on developing a solution procedure by incorporating an approximate evaluation and simulated annealing (SA) into a scatter search (SS) framework to efficiently and effectively solve the probabilistic traveling salesman problem (PTSP). A set of numerical experiments were conducted to test the validity of the proposed algorithm based on the test cases from previous study. The numerical results showed that the SS can enhance the performance in most of the test cases in terms of objective function value. Moreover, the results indicated that incorporating SA and approximate evaluation into the SS framework can significantly increase the computation efficiency while maintaining solution quality.