An effective memetic algorithm for the close-enough traveling salesman problem

The Close-Enough Traveling Salesman Problem (CETSP) is a variant of the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Unlike the TSP, each target in the CETSP has a disk neighborhood, and the target is considered visited when any point in its neighborhood is visited. This feature makes the CETSP a suitable model for many real-world applications. In this work, we propose an effective memetic algorithm that integrates a carefully designed crossover operator and an effective local optimization procedure with original search operators. Experimental results on the 62 well-known benchmark instances show that the algorithm is highly competitive with the state-of-the-art methods, reporting 30 new best upper bounds. We demonstrate the usefulness of the algorithm on a real laser welding robot path planning problem. We provide insights into the understanding of the algorithm design.