Abstract
The Metric Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classical NP-hard optimization problem. The double-tree shortcutting method for Metric TSP yields an exponentially-sized space of TSP tours, each of which approximates the optimal solution within, at most, a factor of 2. We consider the problem of finding among these tours the one that gives the closest approximation, that is, the minimum-weight double-tree shortcutting . Burkard et al. gave an algorithm for this problem, running in time O ( n 3 + 2 d n 2 ) and memory O (2 d n 2 ), where d is the maximum node degree in the rooted minimum spanning tree. We give an improved algorithm for the case of small d (including planar Euclidean TSP, where d ≤ 4), running in time O (4 d n 2 ) and memory O (4 d n ). This improvement allows one to solve the problem on much larger instances than previously attempted. Our computational experiments suggest that in terms of the time-quality trade-off, the minimum-weight double-tree shortcutting method provides one of the best existing tour-constructing heuristics.
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