The effective application of a new approach to the generalized orienteering problem

The orienteering problem (OP) is a well established problem in combinatorial optimization. In this problem, there is a set of n nodes or cities, V , and each node i has an associated non-negative score S(i). If a city is visited on a route, then its score is gathered (but visiting a city more than once does not yield additional scoring). Hence, the score associated with a path visiting a set of nodes N is SN = ∑ i∈N S(i). Algorithms for the OP seek the path from a defined source node (init) to a defined destination node (end) that yields the highest score while not exceeding a pre-defined distance limit, dlim.