A Construction Tour Technique For Solving The Travelling Salesman Problem Based On Convex Hull And Nearest Neighbour Heuristics

This study presents a construction tour technique (CH-NN) for solving the Travelling Salesman Problem based on the Convex-hull and Nearest Neighbor heuristics. The aim is to combine the advantages of both algorithms as well as minimize their substantial disadvantages. The algorithm was implemented using Python programming language running on Intel Pentium Core i7 3GHz, Windows 10 (64bit). Benchmark instances from TSPLIB were solved using the hybrid heuristics and compared with results from two classic construction heuristics, namely Nearest Neighbour (NN) and Nearest Insertion (NI). The experimental results show that the hybrid heuristic outperforms both NN and NI both in terms of computational speed and closeness to the optimal solution.