Approximation of the Double Travelling Salesman Problem with Multiple Stacks

The Double Travelling Salesman Problem with Multiple Stacks, DTSPMS, deals with the collect and delivery of n commodities in two distinct cities, where the pickup and the delivery tours are related by LIFO constraints. During the pickup tour, commodities are loaded into a container of k rows, or stacks, with capacity c. This paper focuses on computational aspects of the DTSPMS, which is NP-hard. We first review the complexity of two critical subproblems: deciding whether a given pair of pickup and delivery tours is feasible and, given a loading plan, finding an optimal pair of pickup and delivery tours, are both polynomial under some conditions on k and c. We then prove a (3k)/2 standard approximation for the MinMetrickDTSPMS, where k is a universal constant, and other approximation results for vario