Further Heuristic Approaches

Abstract

Every TSP heuristic has, at least in principle, the chance to find an optimal tour. But, this is an almost impossible event. Usually, an improvement method only finds a locally optimal tour in the sense that, although the tour is not optimal, no further improving moves can be generated. The weaker the local moves that can be performed, the larger the difference between the length of an optimal tour and of the tour found by the heuristic. One way to obtain better performance is to start improvement heuristics many times with different starting tours, because this increases the chance of finding better local minima. Success is limited, though.