The probabilistic traveling salesman problem concerns the best way to visit a set of customers located in some metric
space, where each customer requires a visit only with some known probability. A solution to this problem is an a priori
tour which visits all customers, and the objective is to minimize the expected length of the a priori tour over all customer
subsets, assuming that customers in any given subset must be visited in the same order as they appear in the a priori
tour. This problem belongs to the class of stochastic vehicle routing problems, a class which has received increasing
attention in recent years, and which is of major importance in real world applications.
Several heuristics have been proposed and tested for the probabilistic traveling salesman problem, many of which are
a straightforward adaptation of heuristics for the classical traveling salesman problem. In particular, two local search
algorithms (2-p-opt and 1-shift) were introduced by Bertsimas.
In a previous report we have shown that the expressions for the cost evaluation of 2-p-opt and 1-shift moves, as
proposed by Bertsimas, are not correct. In this paper we derive the correct versions of these expressions, and we show
that the local search algorithms based on these expressions perform significantly better than those exploiting the
incorrect expressions