Hamiltonian decomposition and verifying vertex adjacency in 1-skeleton of the traveling salesperson polytope by variable neighborhood search

We consider a Hamiltonian decomposition problem of partitioning a regular graph into edge-disjoint Hamiltonian cycles. A sufficient condition for vertex adjacency in the 1-skeleton of the traveling salesperson polytope can be formulated as the Hamiltonian decomposition problem in a 4-regular multigraph. We introduce a heuristic general variable neighborhood search algorithm for this problem based on finding a vertex-disjoint cycle cover of the multigraph through reduction to perfect matching and several cycle merging operations. The algorithm has a one-sided error: the answer “not adjacent” is always correct, and was tested on random directed and undirected Hamiltonian cycles and on pyramidal tours.