Reactive GRASP for the Prize-collecting Covering Tour Problem

Abstract

This paper presents a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) for the Prize-Collecting Covering Tour Problem (PCCTP), which is the problem of finding a route for traveling teams that provide services to communities geographically distant from large urban locations. We devised a novel hybrid heuristic by combining a reactive extension of the GRASP with Random Variable Neighborhood Search (VND) meta-heuristic for the purpose of solving the PCCTP. Computational experiments were conducted on a PCCTP benchmark from the literature, and the results demonstrate our approach provides a significant improvement in solving PCCTP and comparable with the state-of-the-art, mainly regarding the computational processing time.