A simheuristic approach for the stochastic team orienteering problem

The team orienteering problem is a variant of the well-known vehicle routing problem in which a set of vehicle tours are constructed in such in a way that: (i) the total collected reward received from visiting a subset of customers is maximized; and (ii) the length of each vehicle tour is restricted by a pre-specified limit. While most existing works refer to the deterministic version of the problem and focus on maximizing total reward, some degree of uncertainty (e.g., in customers' service times or in travel times) should be expected in real-life applications. Accordingly, this paper proposes a simheuristic algorithm for solving the stochastic team orienteering problem, where goals other than maximizing the expected reward need to be considered. A series of numerical experiments contribute to illustrate the potential of our approach, which integrates Monte Carlo simulation inside a metaheuristic framework.