Benchmarking algorithms for dynamic travelling salesman problems

Dynamic optimisation problems are becoming increasingly important; meanwhile, progress in optimisation techniques and in computational resources are permitting the development of effective systems for dynamic optimisation, resulting in a need for objective methods to evaluate and compare different techniques. The search for effective techniques may be seen as a multi-objective problem, trading off time complexity against effectiveness; hence benchmarks must be able to compare techniques across the Pareto front, not merely at a single point. We propose benchmarks for the dynamic travelling salesman problem, adapted from the CHN-144 benchmark of 144 Chinese cities for the static travelling salesman problem. We provide an example of the use of the benchmark, and illustrate the information that can be gleaned from analysis of the algorithm performance on the benchmarks.