¹Northeastern University, Shenyang, China

Correspondence: L Tang, The Logistics Institute, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110004, China. E-mail: qhjytlx@mail.neu.edu.cn

Received September 2005; Accepted September 2006; Published online 31 January 2007.

Abstract

This paper considers a variant of the travelling salesman problem named the capacitated prize-collecting travelling salesman problem (CPCTSP), which is derived from the colour-coating production scheduling in a cold rolling mill. The objective of the CPCTSP is to minimize the travel cost and the penalties paid for unvisited customers in such a way that a sufficiently large prize is collected and the demand of the visited customers does not exceed the salesman's capacity. For this problem, we propose an iterated local search (ILS) heuristic adopting guided kick and enhanced dynasearch. The experimental results on randomly generated instances show that the proposed heuristic outperforms the improved tabu search algorithm using frequency-based memory, and the further experimental results on instances collected from real colour-coating production also show that the proposed ILS algorithm is more effective and efficient than the currently adopted manual scheduling method.