A Memetic Algorithm for the Team Orienteering Problem

The Team Orienteering Problem (TOP) is an expansion of the orienteering problem. The problem’s data is a set of nodes and each node is associated with a score value. The goal of the TOP is to construct a discrete number of routes in order to visit the nodes and collect their scores aiming to maximize the total collected score with respect to a total travel time constraint. In this paper we propose a Memetic algorithm with Similarity Operator (\(\operatorname {MSO-TOP}\)) for solving the TOP. The concept of the “similarity operator” is that feasible sub-routes of the solutions are serving as chromosomes. The efficacy of \(\operatorname {MSO-TOP}\) was tested using the known benchmark instances for the TOP. From the experiments it was concluded that “similarity operator” is a promising technique and \(\operatorname {MSO-TOP}\) produces quality solutions.