A Proposal of Good Practice in the Formulation and Comparison of Meta-heuristics for Solving Routing Problems

Researchers who investigate in any field related to computational algorithms (defining new algorithms or improving existing ones) find large difficulties when evaluating their work. Comparisons among different scientific works in this area is often difficult, due to the ambiguity or lack of detail in the presentation of the work or its results. In many cases, a replication of the work done by others is required, which means a waste of time and a delay in the research advances. After suffering this problem in many occasions, a simple procedure has been developed to use in the presentation of techniques and its results in the field of routing problems. In this paper this procedure is described in detail, and all the good practices to follow are introduced step by step. Although these good practices can be applied for any type of combinatorial optimization problem, the literature of this study is focused in routing problems. This field has been chosen due to its importance in the real world, and its great relevance in the literature.