A simulated annealing heuristic for the team orienteering problem with time windows

This paper presents a simulated annealing based heuristic approach for the team orienteering problem with time windows (TOPTW). Given a set of known locations, each with a score, a service time, and a time window, the TOPTW finds a set of vehicle tours that maximizes the total collected scores. Each tour is limited in length and a visit to a location must start within the location’s service time window. The proposed heuristic is applied to benchmark instances. Computational results indicate that the proposed heuristic is competitive with other solution approaches in the literature.

► We study the team orienteering problem with time windows (TOPTW). ► We develop a simulated annealing heuristic for the TOPTW. ► The proposed heuristic is competitive with existing solution approaches. ► Best-known solutions are found for more than 1/2 of the benchmark instances. ► 33 best-known solutions are updated.