Exploring greedy criteria for the dynamic traveling purchaser problem

Given a set of products and a set of markets, the traveling purchaser problem looks for a tour visiting a subset of the markets to satisfy products demand at the minimum purchasing and traveling costs. In this paper, we analyze the dynamic variant of the problem (D-TPP) where the quantity made available in each market for each product may decrease over time. We introduce and compare several greedy strategies and test their impact on the solution in terms of feasibility and costs. In particular, we study an incremental approach where an initial naive strategy is improved and refined by a number of variants. Some of the proposed heuristics take into account either one of the two objective costs, while others are based on both traveling and purchasing costs. Extensive computational results are also provided on randomly generated instances.