Anytime Behavior of Inexact TSP Solvers and Perspectives for Automated Algorithm Selection

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

The Traveling-Salesperson-Problem (TSP) is arguably one of the best-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. The two sophisticated heuristic solvers LKH and EAX and respective (restart) variants manage to calculate close-to optimal or even optimal solutions, also for large instances with several thousand nodes in reasonable time. In this work we extend existing benchmarking studies by addressing anytime behaviour of inexact TSP solvers based on empirical runtime distributions leading to an increased understanding of solver behaviour and the respective relation to problem hardness. It turns out that performance ranking of solvers is highly dependent on the focused approximation quality. Insights on intersection points of performances offer huge potential for the construction of hybridized solvers depending on instance features. Moreover, instance features tailored to anytime performance and corresponding performance indicators will highly improve automated algorithm selection models by including comprehensive information on solver quality.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2020 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)
Publication statusPublished - 3 Sept 2020
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85092043224