Dancing to the State of the Art? How Candidate Lists Influence LKH for Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Heins, Jonathan, Schäpermeier, Lennart, Kerschke, Pascal, Whitley, Darrell
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Heins, Jonathan
Schäpermeier, Lennart
Kerschke, Pascal
Whitley, Darrell
author_facet Heins, Jonathan
Schäpermeier, Lennart
Kerschke, Pascal
Whitley, Darrell
contents Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) remains a persistent challenge, despite its fundamental role in numerous generalized applications in modern contexts. Heuristic solvers address the demand for finding high-quality solutions efficiently. Among these solvers, the Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun (LKH) heuristic stands out, as it complements the performance of genetic algorithms across a diverse range of problem instances. However, frequent timeouts on challenging instances hinder the practical applicability of the solver. Within this work, we investigate a previously overlooked factor contributing to many timeouts: The use of a fixed candidate set based on a tree structure. Our investigations reveal that candidate sets based on Hamiltonian circuits contain more optimal edges. We thus propose to integrate this promising initialization strategy, in the form of POPMUSIC, within an efficient restart version of LKH. As confirmed by our experimental studies, this refined TSP heuristic is much more efficient - causing fewer timeouts and improving the performance (in terms of penalized average runtime) by an order of magnitude - and thereby challenges the state of the art in TSP solving.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_03927
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dancing to the State of the Art? How Candidate Lists Influence LKH for Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem
Heins, Jonathan
Schäpermeier, Lennart
Kerschke, Pascal
Whitley, Darrell
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) remains a persistent challenge, despite its fundamental role in numerous generalized applications in modern contexts. Heuristic solvers address the demand for finding high-quality solutions efficiently. Among these solvers, the Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun (LKH) heuristic stands out, as it complements the performance of genetic algorithms across a diverse range of problem instances. However, frequent timeouts on challenging instances hinder the practical applicability of the solver. Within this work, we investigate a previously overlooked factor contributing to many timeouts: The use of a fixed candidate set based on a tree structure. Our investigations reveal that candidate sets based on Hamiltonian circuits contain more optimal edges. We thus propose to integrate this promising initialization strategy, in the form of POPMUSIC, within an efficient restart version of LKH. As confirmed by our experimental studies, this refined TSP heuristic is much more efficient - causing fewer timeouts and improving the performance (in terms of penalized average runtime) by an order of magnitude - and thereby challenges the state of the art in TSP solving.
title Dancing to the State of the Art? How Candidate Lists Influence LKH for Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem
topic Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03927