A novel GRASP solution approach for the Orienteering Problem

The Orienteering Problem (OP) is a well-known variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem. In this paper, a novel Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) solution is proposed to solve the OP. The proposed method is shown to outperform state-of-the-art heuristics for the OP in producing high quality solutions. In comparison with the best known solutions of standard benchmark instances, the method can find the optimal or the best known solution of about 70 % of the instances in a reasonable time, which is about 17 % better than the best known approach in the literature. Moreover, a significant improvement is achieved on the solution of two standard benchmark instances.