Solving the clustered traveling salesman problem via traveling salesman problem methods

Abstract

The Clustered Traveling Salesman Problem (CTSP) is a variant of the popular Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) arising from a number of real-life applications. In this work, we explore a transformation approach that solves the CTSP by converting it to the well-studied TSP. For this purpose, we first investigate a technique to convert a CTSP instance to a TSP and then apply powerful TSP solvers (including exact and heuristic solvers) to solve the resulting TSP instance. We want to answer the following questions: How do state-of-the-art TSP solvers perform on clustered instances converted from the CTSP? Do state-of-the-art TSP solvers compete well with the best performing methods specifically designed for the CTSP? For this purpose, we present intensive computational experiments on various benchmark instances to draw conclusions.