This repository is the implementation in C++ for the paper An Effective Memetic Algorithm for the Close-Enough Traveling Salesman Problem by Zhenyu Lei, Jin-Kao Hao.

We propose an effective memetic algorithm to solve the Close-Enough Traveling Salesman Problem (CETSP) which is a variant of the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Experimental results on the well-known benchmark instances show that the algorithm is highly competitive with the state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate the usefulness of the algorithm on a real laser welding robot path planning problem.

In this repository, we have:

• cmake/ folder contains the cmake configuration for gurobi solver.
• datasets/ folder is for the benchmark instances and real-world instances used in the paper.
• solutions/ folder provides the solutions for benchmark instances and real-world instances
• include/ and src/ folders contain the source code of the algorithm.
• CMakelists.txt is the cmake configuration file.

We conducted experiments on the well-known benchmark instances proposed by Dr. Mennell. The instances are available at link.

And we also tested our algorithm on real-world instances provided by Prof. Béla Vizvári, one of authors of Nedjatia et al.. We provide the instances in the folder datasets/.

It is necessary to install LKH-2.0 solver which is used to optimize the visiting sequence of solutions, and Gurobi 10.0 solver which is used to obtain the optimal visiting positions for a given visiting sequence.

Please configure Gurobi solver path in the CMakeLists.txt, and other necessary directories and parameters in include/Defs.hpp file.

And then compile the code by the following commands:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Then you can run directly the executable binary with default parameters set in include/Defs.hpp by the following command:

./MA-CETSP

In addition, you can run the code with your own parameters by the following command:

./MA-CETSP -i <instance> -s <seed> -r <max iteration> -p <population size> -b <fitness beta> -d <distance threshold> -n <neighbor size>

If it is helpful for your research, please cite our paper:

@article{lei2024effective,
  title={An effective memetic algorithm for the close-enough traveling salesman problem},
  author={Lei, Zhenyu and Hao, Jin-Kao},
  journal={Applied Soft Computing},
  pages={111266},
  year={2024},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}