Implementation of the iterative three-component heuristic for the team orienteering problem with time windows

This thesis studies the Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TOPTW). In this problem, a set of locations is given and each of these locations has a service time, a profit and a time window. The objective is to maximize the profit by visiting the locations, while taking into account the time window of the locations. The aim of this thesis is to reproduce the iterative three-component heuristic (I3CH) by Hu and Lim (2014) for TOPTW. This heuristic consists of a local search and a simulated annealing which give solutions that can be improved by a third component: routing recombination. The heuristic is applied on test instances which is also used in Hu and Lim (2014). Results of the Hu and Lim (2014) are verified and we were also able so find new best known solutions for the TOPTW. Furthermore, we adapted the I3CH for the Orienteering Problem with Hotel Selection and Time Windows. We tested the heuristic on a small set of benchmark instances which also give solutions near the best known solutions for these benchmark instances.