Abstract

IntroductionThe Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the classical discrete (combinatorial) optimization problems, encountered in Operations Research (Lawler et al (1985), Clifford & Siu (1995)). TSP is also one of such problems considered as puzzles by mathematicians. Suppose a salesman has to visit n cities (or nodes) cyclically and in one tour he has to visit each city just once, and finish up where he started. In what order should he visit them to minimize the cost or distance or time travelled? Much of the work on the TSP is not motivated by direct applications, but rather by the fact that the TSP provides an ideal platform for the study of general methods that can be applied to a wide range of discrete optimization problems (Grötschel & Holland (1991), Reinelt (1994), Applegate et al (1998), Cook (web document), Hoffman (web document)).

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