Quality inspection scheduling for multi-unit service enterprises

The traveling salesman problem is a classic NP-hard problem used to model many production and scheduling problems. The problem becomes even more difficult when additional salesmen are added to create a multiple traveling salesman problem (MTSP). We consider a variation of this problem where one salesman visits a given set of cities in a series of short trips. This variation is faced by numerous franchise companies that use quality control inspectors to ensure properties are maintaining acceptable facility and service levels. We model an actual franchised hotel chain using traveling quality inspectors to demonstrate the technique. The model is solved using a commercially available genetic algorithm (GA) tool as well as a custom GA program. The custom GA is proven to be an effective method of solving the proposed model.