A Novel Tour Construction Heuristic for Traveling Salesman Problem Using LFF Principle

Less Flexibility First(LFF) principle is inspired and developed by enhancing some rule-of-thumb guidelines resulting from the generation-long work experience of human professionals in ancient days. In this paper, we generalize this principle to the classical Traveling Salesman Problem and propose a tour construction heuristic. Our new heuristic is closely related to Cheapest Insertion, a well-known heuristic for TSP. Then we prove that our algorithm can be implemented to run in O(n) time, achieving a tour no worse than Convex Hull, Cheapest Insertion (CHCI). Experimental results are comparable to simple local search heuristics such as 3-opt and baseline simulated annealing and better than any conventional tour construction heuristic at the expense of increased running time.