A novel randomized heuristic for the team orienteering problem

During the last decades, researchers have shown a great interest in studying the team orienteering problem due to its applications in several fields such as tourist trip planning, technician routing and athlete recruiting. Therefore, solving optimally the team orienteering problem would play a major role in logistics management. In this paper, an unprecedented heuristic is applied to the team orienteering problem. The heuristic is used to generate the initial population for population-based metaheuristics. The heuristic proved its efficiency. Indeed, experiments conducted on the team orienteering problem show that the initial population generated by our heuristic contains the best-known solutions for 67 benchmarks and good solutions for a great number of benchmarks. A good initial population will reduce the computational time and the number of iterations necessary to reaches the best-known solutions.