Ants can orienteer a thief in their robbery

Abstract: The Thief Orienteering Problem (ThOP) is a multi-component problem that combines features of two classic combinatorial optimization problems: Orienteering Problem and Knapsack Problem. The ThOP is challenging due to the given time constraint and the interaction between its components. We propose an Ant Colony Optimization algorithm together with a new packing heuristic to deal individually and interactively with problem components. Our approach outperforms existing work on more than 90% of the benchmarking instances, with an average improvement of over 300%.