Exact Approaches for the Travelling Thief Problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces three exact algorithms and a hybrid method for the Traveling Thief Problem, providing a benchmark to evaluate the accuracy of heuristic approaches on small instances.

Contribution

It presents the first exact solutions for TTP and compares their performance with existing heuristics to assess solution quality.

Findings

Exact algorithms successfully solve small TTP instances

Hybrid approach improves solution accuracy

Heuristics are less reliable for global optima

Abstract

Many evolutionary and constructive heuristic approaches have been introduced in order to solve the Traveling Thief Problem (TTP). However, the accuracy of such approaches is unknown due to their inability to find global optima. In this paper, we propose three exact algorithms and a hybrid approach to the TTP. We compare these with state-of-the-art approaches to gather a comprehensive overview on the accuracy of heuristic methods for solving small TTP instances.