A fixed budget analysis of randomized search heuristics for the traveling salesperson problem

Randomized Search heuristics are frequently applied to NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. The runtime analysis of randomized search heuristics has contributed tremendously to their theoretical understanding. Recently, randomized search heuristics have been examined regarding their achievable progress within a fixed time budget. We follow this approach and present a first fixed budget runtime analysis for a NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. We consider the well-known Traveling Salesperson problem (TSP) and analyze the fitness increase that randomized search heuristics are able to achieve within a given fixed budget.