A Fast Tabu Search Implementation for Large Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problems Defined on Sparse Graphs

Abstract

Real life traveling salesman problem (TSP) instances are often defined on large, sparse, and asymmetric graphs. Tabu search implementations for the TSP that have been reported in the literature almost always deal with small, dense, and symmetric instances. In this paper, we outline a tabu search implementation which can solve TSP instances much faster than conventional implementations if the graph defining the instance is sparse. We present results from computational experiments with this implementation which validate our claim.