An Efficient Heuristic to the Traveling Salesperson Problem with Hotel Selection

Traveling salesperson problem with hotel selection consists of determining a tour for the salesperson who needs to visit a predefined number of customers at different locations by taking into consideration that each working day is limited by time. If the time limit is accomplished, the salesperson must select a hotel from the set of available ones to spend the night. The aim is to minimize the number of necessary days to visit all customers spending the shortest possible travel time. We present an adaptive efficient heuristic based on the Iterated Local Search metaheuristic to solve available instances. The proposed heuristic is able to find good solutions for almost all instances and, in some cases, it is able to improve the quality of the best results found in literature, decreasing the number of trips necessary or time to travel along a tour. Moreover, the heuristic is fast enough to be applied to real problems that require fast responses.