Analysis on the Implementation of Efficient Heuristic Algorithms for the Traveling Salesman Problem

To identify the current state-of-the-art, and to better understand the heuristic components that prove most effective for several classes of heuristic algorithms applied to the TSP, the 8th DIMACS Implementation Challenge on the Traveling Salesman Problem [3] was recently organized by Johnson, McGeogh, Glover and Rego [3]. In this talk we describe findings from this Implementation Challenge as well as our own experience with different algorithm implementations. The outcomes give important insights about how to improve the performance of algorithms for several other circuit-based permutation problems.