The Close Enough Traveling Salesman Problem: A Discussion of Several Heuristics

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) allows utility companies to read meters from a distance. Thus a meter reader need not visit every customer on his route, but only get within a certain radius of each customer. In finding an optimal route — one that minimizes the distance the meter reader travels while servicing each customer on his route — this notion of only needing to be close enough changes the meter reading problem from a standard Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) into a variant problem: Close Enough TSP (CETSP). As a project for a graduate course in network optimization various heuristics for finding near optimal CETSP solutions were developed by six groups of students. In this paper we survey the heuristics and provide results for a diverse set of sample cases.