The multiple traveling purchaser problem for maximizing system’s reliability with budget constraints

Abstract

The traveling purchaser problem (TPP) is a generalization of the well-known traveling salesman problem (TSP), which has many real-world applications such as purchasing the required raw materials for the manufacturing factories and the scheduling of a set of jobs over some machines, and many others. TPP also could be extended to the vehicle routing problem (VRP) by incorporating additional constraints such as multi-purchaser, capacity, distance and time restrictions. In the last decade, TPP has received some attention of the researchers in the operational research area. However it has not received the equivalent interest as much as TSP and VRP. Therefore, there does not exist a TPP study considering the reliability of components. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the ILP formulation for multiple TPP to maximize system’s reliability under budget constraint.