Abstract
A fundamental variant of the classical traveling salesman problem (TSP) is the so-called multiple TSP (mTSP), where a set of m salesmen jointly visit all cities from a set of n cities. The mTSP models many important real-life applications, in particular for vehicle routing problems. An extensive survey by Bektas (Omega34(3), 2006) lists a variety of heuristic and exact solution procedures for the mTSP that solve particular problem instances. In this work we consider a further generalization of mTSP, the many-visits mTSP, where each city v has a request r(v) of how many times it should be visited by the salesmen. This problem opens up new real-life applications such as aircraft sequencing, while at the same time it poses several computational challenges. We provide polynomial-time algorithms for several variants of the many-visits mTSP that compute constant-factor approximate solutions.
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