A Memetic Approach for the Orienteering Problem

In this paper we present a new memetic approach to solve the orienteering problem. The key method of our proposal is the procedure ReduceExtend which, starting from a permutation of all the vertices in the orienteering problem, produces a feasible path with a locally optimal score. This procedure is coupled with an evolutionary algorithm which navigate the search space of permutations. In our experiments we have considered the following algorithms: the algebraic differential evolution algorithm, and the three continuous algorithms CMA-ES, DE and PSO equipped with the random key technique. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is competitive with the state of the art results of some selected benchmark instances.