An artificial bee colony algorithm approach for the team orienteering problem with time windows

•A highly constrained NP-hard problem is solved by a relatively new technique (ABC).•A new usage of the ABC algorithm for a discrete optimization problem is proposed.•A new food source acceptance criterion is introduced.•A new scout bee search behavior is introduced.

This study addresses a highly constrained NP-hard problem called the team orienteering problem with time windows (TOPTW), which belongs to a well-known class of vehicle routing problems. This study proposes a relatively new technique called artificial bee colony (ABC) approach to solve the TOPTW. Moreover, considering that the number of studies for discrete optimization with an ABC algorithm is comparatively low, this study presents a new use of the ABC algorithm for a difficult discrete optimization problem. Additionally, this study introduces a new food source acceptance criterion and a new scout bee search behavior, both of which significantly contribute to the solution quality. The results show that the proposed method is effective, efficient, and comparable to other approaches.