COMPUTER EXPERIMENTATION
The TOURS software by Marc Goetschalckx will be used to illustrate
further the concepts involved. You will be able to experiment
with different building/insertion/improvement algorithms and see
their performances with respect to time and improvement in the
objective function.
Demo1 demonstrates how to generate a simple model
and how to run the algorithms. Notice that the following steps are involved:
- Select New from the File menu.
- In the dialog box that appears, enter the Problem Name and Number of Points to be generated. Note that the default Report Level is 3.
- Enter the random number seed (It is possible to generate the same problem instance
more than once by using the same seed)
- Once the problem is generated, it is possible to change the locations of points
from the Edit menu.
- First a construction algorithm is selected by selecting Build from the
Algorithm menu. In the demo Hull (convex hull) algorithm is selected to create the intial tour.
- The initial tour is given. Note that the steps involved are not illustrated, since the report level is 3
- Then an Insertion algorithm is selected. In this case Nearest Neighbor is selected.
- Next step is selecting an Exchange algorithm. In this case 3-Opt is selected. Note that no further improvements were made for this sample problem. However, in larger cases it is possible to achieve significant improvements as a result
of exchange algorithms.
Demo2 demonstrates how the change of the Report Level allows the user to witness the individual steps during the run of an algorithm. After running the algorithms, one can see the improvements made by each of the algorithm
s.
In order to run the Tours software, you have to download the following three files to the same directory on your harddisk drive:
(When the security validation message occurs, answer with Save it to disk
and specify the directory.)
tours32.exe
msvcrt10.dll
scient32.dll
