Dynamic programming for the orienteering problem with time windows

This work compares different strategies proposed in the literature to guide decremental state space relaxation and proposes a new heuristic technique to initialize the critical vertex set and provides experimental evidence of its effectiveness.

Abstract

We present an exact optimization algorithm for the Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (OPTW).The algorithm is based on bi-directional and bounded dynamic programming with decremental state space relaxation.We compare different strategies proposed in the literature to guide decremental state space relaxation: our experiments on instances derived from the literature show that there is no dominance between these strategies.We also propose a new heuristic technique to initialize the critical vertex set and we provide experimental evidence of its effectiveness.