Complexity and Stop Conditions for NP as General Assignment Problems, the Travel Salesman Problem in $\mathbb{R}^2$, Knight Tour Problem and Boolean Satisfiability Problem
This paper presents stop conditions for solving General Assignment Problems (GAP), in particular for Travel Salesman Problem in an Euclidian 2D space the well known condition Jordan's simple curve and opposite condition for the Knight Tour Problem. The Jordan's simple curve condition means that a optimal trajectory must be simple curve, i.e., without crossing but for Knight Tour Problem we use the contrary, the feasible trajectory must have crossing in all cities of the tour. The paper presents the algorithms, examples and some results come from Concorde's Home page. Several problem are studied to depict their properties. A classical decision problem SAT is studied in detail.
We introduce two new metrics of "simplicity" for knight's tours: the number of turns and the number of crossings. We give a novel algorithm that produces tours with $9.25n+O(1)$ turns and $12n+O(1)$ crossings on an $n\times n$ board, and we show lower bounds of $(6-ε)n$ and $4n-O(1)$ on the respective problems of minimizing these metrics. Hence, our algorithm achieves approximation ratios of $9.25/6+o(1)$ and $3+o(1)$. Our algorithm takes linear time and is fully parallelizable, i.e., the tour can be computed in $O(n^2/p)$ time using $p$ processors in the CREW PRAM model. We generalize our tec…
In this paper we consider the Recoverable Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Here the task is to find two tours simultaneously, such that the intersection between the tours is at least a given minimum size, while the sum of travel distances with respect to two different distance metrics is minimized. Building upon the classic double-tree method, we derive a 4-approximation algorithm for the RecoverableTSP. We also show that if the required size of the intersection between the tours is constant, a 2-approximation guarantee can be achieved, even if more than two tours need to be constructed. We d…
TSP (Traveling Salesman Problem), a classic NP-complete problem in combinatorial optimization, is of great significance in multiple fields. Exact algorithms for TSP are not practical due to their exponential time cost. Thus, approximate algorithms become the research focus and can be further divided into two types, tour construction algorithms and tour improvement algorithms. Researches show that the latter type of algorithms can obtain better solutions than the former one. However, traditional tour improvement algorithms have shortcomings. They converge very slowly and tend to be trapped in l…
The 2-Opt heuristic is a simple improvement heuristic for the Traveling Salesman Problem. It starts with an arbitrary tour and then repeatedly replaces two edges of the tour by two other edges, as long as this yields a shorter tour. We will prove that for Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problems with $n$ cities the approximation ratio of the 2-Opt heuristic is $Θ(\log n/ \log \log n)$. This improves the upper bound of $O(\log n$) given by Chandra, Karloff, and Tovey [3] in 1999.
The Covering Salesman Problem (CSP) is a generalization of the Traveling Salesman Problem in which the tour is not required to visit all vertices, as long as all vertices are covered by the tour. The objective of CSP is to find a minimum length Hamiltonian cycle over a subset of vertices that covers an undirected graph. In this paper, valid inequalities from the generalized traveling salesman problem are applied to the CSP in addition to new valid inequalities that explore distinct aspects of the problem. A branch-and-cut framework assembles exact and heuristic separation routines for integer …
In this paper, we study problems of connecting classes of points via noncrossing structures. Given a set of colored terminal points, we want to find a graph for each color that connects all terminals of its color with the restriction that no two graphs cross each other. We consider these problems both on the Euclidean plane and in planar graphs. On the algorithmic side, we give a Gap-ETH-tight EPTAS for the two-colored traveling salesman problem as well as for the red-blue-green separation problem (in which we want to separate terminals of three colors with two noncrossing polygons of minimum …
We consider the Travelling Salesman Problem with Vertex Requisitions, where for each position of the tour at most two possible vertices are given. It is known that the problem is strongly NP-hard. The proposed algorithm for this problem has less time complexity compared to the previously known one. In particular, almost all feasible instances of the problem are solvable in O(n) time using the new algorithm, where n is the number of vertices. The developed approach also helps in fast enumeration of a neighborhood in the local search and yields an integer programming model with O(n) binary varia…
The generalized traveling salesman problem (GTSP) is an extension of the well-known traveling salesman problem. In GTSP, we are given a partition of cities into groups and we are required to find a minimum length tour that includes exactly one city from each group. The aim of this paper is to present a problem reduction algorithm that deletes redundant vertices and edges, preserving the optimal solution. The algorithm's running time is O(N^3) in the worst case, but it is significantly faster in practice. The algorithm has reduced the problem size by 15-20% on average in our experiments and thi…
Let M be an nXn symetric matrix, n, even, T, an upper bound for T_OPT, an optimal tour, sigma_T, the smaller-valued perfect matching obtained from alternate edges of T expressed as a product of 2-cycles. Applying the modified Floyd-Warshall algorithm to (sigma_T)^-1M^-, we construct acceptable and 2-circuit cycles some sets of which may yield circuits that can be patched into tours. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for a set, S, of cycles to yield circuits that may be patched into a tour.Assume that the following (Condition A)is valid: If (sigma_T)s = T*, |T*|<T, then all cycles o…
The generalized traveling salesman problem (GTSP) is an extension of the well-known traveling salesman problem. In GTSP, we are given a partition of cities into groups and we are required to find a minimum length tour that includes exactly one city from each group. The recent studies on this subject consider different variations of a memetic algorithm approach to the GTSP. The aim of this paper is to present a new memetic algorithm for GTSP with a powerful local search procedure. The experiments show that the proposed algorithm clearly outperforms all of the known heuristics with respect to bo…
We consider the multiple traveling salesman problem on a weighted tree. In this problem there are $m$ salesmen located at the root initially. Each of them will visit a subset of vertices and return to the root. The goal is to assign a tour to every salesman such that every vertex is visited and the longest tour among all salesmen is minimized. The problem is equivalent to the subtree cover problem, in which we cover a tree with rooted subtrees such that the weight of the maximum weighted subtree is minimized. The classical machine scheduling problem can be viewed as a special case of our probl…
We present a very simple family of traveling salesman instances with $n$ cities where the nearest neighbor rule may produce a tour that is $Θ(\log n)$ times longer than an optimum solution. Our family works for the graphic, the euclidean, and the rectilinear traveling salesman problem at the same time. It improves the so far best known lower bound in the euclidean case and proves for the first time a lower bound in the rectilinear case.
In the maximum traveling salesman problem (Max TSP) we are given a complete undirected graph with nonnegative weights on the edges and we wish to compute a traveling salesman tour of maximum weight. We present a fast combinatorial $\frac 45$ - approximation algorithm for Max TSP. The previous best approximation for this problem was $\frac 79$. The new algorithm is based on a novel technique of eliminating difficult subgraphs via half-edges, a new method of edge coloring and a technique of exchanging edges. A half-edge of edge $e=(u,v)$ is informally speaking "a half of $e$ containing either $u…
The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the most challenging NP-hard problems. It has widely applications in various disciplines such as physics, biology, computer science and so forth. The best known approximation algorithm for Symmetric TSP (STSP) whose cost matrix satisfies the triangle inequality (called $\triangle$STSP) is Christofides algorithm which was proposed in 1976 and is a $\frac{3}{2}$-approximation. Since then no proved improvement is made and improving upon this bound is a fundamental open question in combinatorial optimization. In this paper, for the first time, we prop…
This paper describes a formulation and develops a novel procedure for a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from the perspective of remotely executable tasks. In a complex mission environment, the characteristics of vehicles can be different in terms of sensing capability, range, direction, or the motion constraints. The purpose of this paper is to find a set of paths that minimizes the sum of costs while every task region is visited exactly once under certain reasonable assumptions. The heterogeneous multi-UAV path planning problem is formulated as a generalized, heterogeneous, multiple …
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is among the most famous NP-hard optimization problems. We design for this problem a randomized polynomial-time algorithm that computes a (1+eps)-approximation to the optimal tour, for any fixed eps>0, in TSP instances that form an arbitrary metric space with bounded intrinsic dimension. The celebrated results of Arora (A-98) and Mitchell (M-99) prove that the above result holds in the special case of TSP in a fixed-dimensional Euclidean space. Thus, our algorithm demonstrates that the algorithmic tractability of metric TSP depends on the dimensionality of …
Given a traveling salesman problem (TSP) tour $H$ in graph $G$ a $k$-move is an operation which removes $k$ edges from $H$, and adds $k$ edges of $G$ so that a new tour $H'$ is formed. The popular $k$-OPT heuristics for TSP finds a local optimum by starting from an arbitrary tour $H$ and then improving it by a sequence of $k$-moves. Until 2016, the only known algorithm to find an improving $k$-move for a given tour was the naive solution in time $O(n^k)$. At ICALP'16 de Berg, Buchin, Jansen and Woeginger showed an $O(n^{\lfloor 2/3k \rfloor+1})$-time algorithm. We show an algorithm which runs …
Surveillance applications require a collection of heterogeneous vehicles to visit a set of targets. In this article, we consider a fundamental routing problem that arises in these applications involving two vehicles. Specifically, we consider a routing problem where there are two heterogeneous vehicles that start from distinct initial locations, and a set of targets. The objective is to find a tour for each vehicle such that each of the targets is visited at least once by a vehicle and the sum of the distances traveled by the vehicles is a minimum. We present a primal-dual algorithm for a vari…
We present a new approach for gluing tours over certain tight, 3-edge cuts. Gluing over 3-edge cuts has been used in algorithms for finding Hamilton cycles in special graph classes and in proving bounds for 2-edge-connected subgraph problem, but not much was known in this direction for gluing connected multigraphs. We apply this approach to the traveling salesman problem (TSP) in the case when the objective function of the subtour elimination relaxation is minimized by a $θ$-cyclic point: $x_e \in \{0,θ, 1-θ, 1\}$, where the support graph is subcubic and each vertex is incident to at least one…
We consider the traveling salesman problem when the cities are points in R^d for some fixed d and distances are computed according to geometric distances, determined by some norm. We show that for any polyhedral norm, the problem of finding a tour of maximum length can be solved in polynomial time. If arithmetic operations are assumed to take unit time, our algorithms run in time O(n^{f-2} log n), where f is the number of facets of the polyhedron determining the polyhedral norm. Thus for example we have O(n^2 log n) algorithms for the cases of points in the plane under the Rectilinear and Sup …
We give the first algorithmic study of a class of ``covering tour'' problems related to the geometric Traveling Salesman Problem: Find a polygonal tour for a cutter so that it sweeps out a specified region (``pocket''), in order to minimize a cost that depends mainly on the number of em turns. These problems arise naturally in manufacturing applications of computational geometry to automatic tool path generation and automatic inspection systems, as well as arc routing (``postman'') problems with turn penalties. We prove the NP-completeness of minimum-turn milling and give efficient approximati…
The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；University of Warwick（华威大学）
We introduce the Constrained Least-cost Tour (CLT) problem: given an undirected graph with weight and cost functions on the edges, minimise the total cost of a tour rooted at a start vertex such that the total weight lies within a given range. CLT is related to the family of Travelling Salesman Problems with Profits, but differs by defining the weight function on edges instead of vertices, and by requiring the total weight to be within a range instead of being at least some quota. We prove CLT is $\mathcal{NP}$-hard, even in the simple case when the input graph is a path. We derive an informat…
Given a set $P$ of $n$ points with their pairwise distances, the traveling salesman problem (TSP) asks for a shortest tour that visits each point exactly once. A TSP instance is rectilinear when the points lie in the plane and the distance considered between two points is the $l_1$ distance. In this paper, a fixed-parameter algorithm for the Rectilinear TSP is presented and relies on techniques for solving TSP on bounded-treewidth graphs. It proves that the problem can be solved in $O\left(nh7^h\right)$ where $h \leq n$ denotes the number of horizontal lines containing the points of $P$. The s…
Recent papers on approximation algorithms for the traveling salesman problem (TSP) have given a new variant on the well-known Christofides' algorithm for the TSP, called the Best-of-Many Christofides' algorithm. The algorithm involves sampling a spanning tree from the solution the standard LP relaxation of the TSP, subject to the condition that each edge is sampled with probability at most its value in the LP relaxation. One then runs Christofides' algorithm on the tree by computing a minimum-cost matching on the odd-degree vertices in the tree, and shortcutting the resulting Eulerian graph to…
We study the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) on the metric completion of cubic and subcubic graphs, which is known to be NP-hard. The problem is of interest because of its relation to the famous 4/3 conjecture for metric TSP, which says that the integrality gap, i.e., the worst case ratio between the optimal values of the TSP and its linear programming relaxation (the subtour elimination relaxation), is 4/3. We present the first algorithm for cubic graphs with approximation ratio 4/3. The proof uses polyhedral techniques in a surprising way, which is of independent interest. In fact we prove…
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, i.e.\ the \emph{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 spannin…
Orienteering problems (OPs) are a variant of the well-known prize-collecting traveling salesman problem, where the salesman needs to choose a subset of cities to visit within a given deadline. OPs and their extensions with stochastic travel times (SOPs) have been used to model vehicle routing problems and tourist trip design problems. However, they suffer from two limitations travel times between cities are assumed to be time independent and the route provided is independent of the risk preference (with respect to violating the deadline) of the user. To address these issues, we make the follow…
