On interval covering salesman problem

After a disaster, during humanitarian relief transportation or mass fatality management, cost of journey between two places may be uncertain due to the variation of degree of devastation in the affected area. In such scenarios, a viable model is essential to handle the situation in cost-effective and reliable manner which is able to handle this uncertainty. In this paper, we introduce interval covering salesman problem (ICSP), where cost of an edge is represented by interval number. ICSP is a variant of covering salesman problem (CSP) which is helpful for many real-world problems in uncertain environment. Here, we formulate a mathematical model for ICSP with uncertain cost associated with the cost of travel between two nodes/places. We have proposed a metameric genetic algorithm (MGA) for ICSP and presented its simulation results. For implementation, we have used some benchmark TSP instances by changing the costs to interval numbers.