Approximation Ineffectiveness of a Tour-Untangling Heuristic

02/22/2023

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by   Bodo Manthey, et al.

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We analyze a tour-uncrossing heuristic for the Travelling Salesperson Problem, showing that its worst-case approximation ratio is Ω(n) and its average-case approximation ratio is Ω(√(n)) in expectation. We furthermore evaluate the approximation performance of this heuristic numerically on average-case instances, and find that it performs far better than the average-case lower bound suggests. This indicates a shortcoming in the approach we use for our analysis, which is a rather common approach in the analysis of local search heuristics.