Dealing with time in the multiple traveling salespersons problem with moving targets

Abstract The multiple traveling salespersons problem with moving targets is a generalization of the classical traveling salespersons problem, where the targets (nodes or objects) are moving over time. Additionally, for each target a visibility time window is given. The task is to find routes for several salespersons so that each target is reached exactly once within its visibility time window and the sum of all traveled distances of all salespersons is minimal. We present different modeling formulations for this TSP variant. The time requirements are modeled differently in each approach. Our goal is to examine what formulation is most suitable in terms of runtime to solve the multiple traveling salespersons problem with moving targets with exact methods. Computational experiments are carried out on randomly generated test instances to compare the different modeling approaches. The results for large-scale instances show, that the best way to model time requirements is to directly insert them into a formulation with discrete time steps.