A novel approach to the Orienteering Problem based on the Harmony Search algorithm.

Abstract

This article presents a new approach to designing a Harmony Search (HS) algorithm, adapted to solve Orienteering Problem (OP) instances. OP is a significant [Formula: see text]-hard problem that has considerable practical application, requiring the development of an effective method for determining its solutions. The proposed HS has demonstrated its effectiveness through determined optimum results for each task from the six most popular benchmarks; a marginal number approximated the best results, with the average error below 0.01%. The article details the application of this described algorithm, comparing its results with those of state-of-the-art methods, indicating the significant efficiency of the proposed approach.