On Randomness and Structure in Euclidean TSP Instances: A Study With Heuristic Methods

Prediction of the quality of the result provided by a specific solving method is an important factor when choosing how to solve a given problem. The more accurate the prediction, the more appropriate the decision on what to choose when several solving applications are available. In this article, we study the impact of the structure of a Traveling Salesman Problem instance on the quality of the solution when using two representative heuristics: the population-based Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and the local search Lin-Kernighan (LK) algorithm. The quality of the result for a solving method is measured by the computation accuracy, which is expressed using the percent error between its soluti…