Quota Traveling Salesman with Passengers and Collection Time

This study addresses a new variant of the Quota Traveling Salesman Problem in which the salesman is thought to be a driver of a vehicle and can share travel costs with passengers in his car. The vehicle has limited capacity. The salesman can choose to collect or not the bonus of a visited vertex. The bonus collection requires that some time is spent on the vertex. There is a ride request associated with each person who demands a ride. The ride request consists of pickup and drop-off location, maximum travel duration, and budget limit. A travel request can be accepted if the origin and destination points agree with the direction of the salesman's route, and the car capacity is not exceeded. This study presents a mathematical formulation for the Quota Traveling Salesman Problem with Passengers and Collection Time problem and the first exact and heuristic results. We present a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure hybridized with Variable Neighborhood Search and the results of a computational experiment with 90 instances up to 200 vertices.