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 (Omega 34(3), 2006) lists a variety of heuristic and exact solution procedures for the mTSP, which quickly 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 multiple efficient approximation algorithms for important variants of the many-visits mTSP, which are guaranteed to quickly compute high-quality solutions for all problem instances.
We give a constant factor approximation algorithm for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem when the support graph of the solution of the Held-Karp linear programming relaxation has bounded orientable genus.
Traveling salesman problem is a NP-hard problem. Until now, researchers have not found a polynomial time algorithm for traveling salesman problem. Among the existing algorithms, dynamic programming algorithm can solve the problem in time O(n^2*2^n) where n is the number of nodes in the graph. The branch-and-cut algorithm has been applied to solve the problem with a large number of nodes. However, branch-and-cut algorithm also has an exponential worst-case running time. In this paper, a new exact algorithm for traveling salesman problem is proposed. The algorithm can be used to solve an arbitra…
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…
We prove that the approximation ratio of the greedy algorithm for the metric Traveling Salesman Problem is $Θ(\log n)$. Moreover, we prove that the same result also holds for graphic, Euclidean, and rectilinear instances of the Traveling Salesman Problem. Finally we show that the approximation ratio of the Clarke-Wright savings heuristic for the metric Traveling Salesman Problem is $Θ(\log n)$.
In the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), a salesman wants to visit a set of cities and return home. There is a cost $c_{ij}$ of traveling from city $i$ to city $j$, which is the same in either direction for the Symmetric TSP. The objective is to visit each city exactly once, minimizing total travel costs. In the Graphical TSP, a city may be visited more than once, which may be necessary on a sparse graph. We present a new integer programming formulation for the Graphical TSP requiring only two classes of constraints that are either polynomial in number or polynomially separable, while addressi…
Proposed initially from a practical circumstance, the traveling salesman problem caught the attention of numerous economists, computer scientists, and mathematicians. These theorists were instead intrigued by seeking a systemic way to find the optimal route. Many attempts have been made along the way and all concluded the nonexistence of a general algorithm that determines optimal solution to all traveling salesman problems alike. In this study, we present proof for the nonexistence of such an algorithm for both asymmetric (with oriented roads) and symmetric (with unoriented roads) traveling s…
This article presents counter examples for three articles claiming that P=NP. Articles for which it applies are: Moustapha Diaby "P = NP: Linear programming formulation of the traveling salesman problem" and "Equality of complexity classes P and NP: Linear programming formulation of the quadratic assignment problem", and also Sergey Gubin "A Polynomial Time Algorithm for The Traveling Salesman Problem"
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 asymmetric traveling salesman problem (Max ATSP) we are given a complete directed graph with nonnegative weights on the edges and we wish to compute a traveling salesman tour of maximum weight. In this paper we give a fast combinatorial $\frac 34$-approximation algorithm for Max ATSP. It is based on a novel use of {\it half-edges}, matchings and a new method of edge coloring. (A {\it half-edge} of edge $(u,v)$ is informally speaking "either a head or a tail of $(u,v)$".) The current best approximation algorithms for Max ATSP, achieving the approximation guarantee of $\frac 23$, …
Beware of the Classical Benchmark Instances for the Traveling Salesman Problem with Time Windows
Universidad Nacional de Quilmes（基尔梅斯国立大学）；CONICET-Universidad de Buenos Aires. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación (ICC)（阿根廷国家科学研究和技术委员会-布宜诺斯艾利斯大学 计算机科学研究所在）
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 well known $4/3$ conjecture states that the integrality ratio of the subtour LP is at most $4/3$ for metric Traveling Salesman instances. We present a family of Euclidean Traveling Salesman instances for which we prove that the integrality ratio of the subtour LP converges to $4/3$. These instances (using the rounded Euclidean norm) turn out to be hard to solve exactly with Concorde, the fastest existing exact TSP solver. For a 200 vertex instance from our family of Euclidean Traveling Salesman instances Concorde needs several days of CPU time. This is more than 1,000,000 times the runtime…
The 2-Opt heuristic is one of the simplest algorithms for finding good solutions to the metric Traveling Salesman Problem. It is the key ingredient to the well-known Lin-Kernighan algorithm and often used in practice. So far, only upper and lower bounds on the approximation ratio of the 2-Opt heuristic for the metric TSP were known. We prove that for the metric TSP with $n$ cities, the approximation ratio of the 2-Opt heuristic is $\sqrt{n/2}$ and that this bound is tight.
The Quadratic Travelling Salesman Problem (QTSP) is to find a least cost Hamilton cycle in an edge-weighted graph, where costs are defined on all pairs of edges contained in the Hamilton cycle. This is a more general version than the commonly studied QTSP which only considers pairs of adjacent edges. We define a restricted version of QTSP, the $k$-neighbour TSP (TSP($k$)), and give a linear time algorithm to solve TSP($k$) on a Halin graph for $k\leq 3$. This algorithm can be extended to solve TSP($k$) on any fully reducible class of graphs for any fixed $k$ in polynomial time. This result gen…
For the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (ATSP), it is known that the Dantzig-Fulkerson-Johnson (DFJ) polytope is contained in the Miller-Tucker-Zemlin (MTZ) polytope. The analytic proofs of this fact are quite long. Here, we present a proof which is combinatorial and significantly shorter by relating the formulation to distances in a modified graph.
We consider a variation of the well-known traveling salesman problem in which there are multiple agents who all have to tour the whole set of nodes of the same graph, while obeying node- and edge-capacity constraints require that agents must not "crash". We consider the simplest model in which the input is an undirected graph with all capacities equal to one. A solution to the synchronized traveling salesman problem is called an "agency". Our model puts the synchronized traveling salesman problem in a similar relation with the traveling salesman problem as the so-called evacuation problem, or …
This technical report provides additional results for the main paper ``Probabilistic bounds on the $k-$Traveling Salesman Problem ($k-$TSP) and the Traveling Repairman Problem (TRP)''. For the $k-$TSP, we extend the probabilistic bounds derived in the main paper to the case of distributions with general densities. For the TRP, we propose a utility-based notion of fairness and derive constant-factor probabilistic bounds for this objective, thus extending the TRP bounds from the main paper to non-linear utilities.
We consider the linearization problem associated with the quadratic traveling salesman problem (QTSP). Necessary and sufficient conditions are given for a cost matrix $Q$ of QTSP to be linearizable. It is shown that these conditions can be verified in $O(n^5)$ time. Some simpler sufficient conditions for linearization are also given along with related open problems.
One of the most fundamental results in combinatorial optimization is the polynomial-time 3/2-approximation algorithm for the metric traveling salesman problem. It was presented by Christofides in 1976 and is well known as "the Christofides algorithm". Recently, some authors started calling it "Christofides-Serdyukov algorithm", pointing out that it was published independently in the USSR in 1978. We provide some historic background on Serdyukov's findings and a translation of his article from Russian into English.
Let $tsp(G)$ denote the length of a shortest travelling salesman tour in a graph $G$. We prove that for any $\varepsilon>0$, there exists a simple $2$-connected planar cubic graph $G_1$ such that $tsp(G_1)\ge (1.25-\varepsilon)\cdot|V(G_1)|$, a simple $2$-connected bipartite cubic graph $G_2$ such that $tsp(G_2)\ge (1.2-\varepsilon)\cdot|V(G_2)|$, and a simple $3$-connected cubic graph $G_3$ such that $tsp(G_3)\ge (1.125-\varepsilon)\cdot|V(G_3)|$.
We study a semidefinite programming relaxation of the traveling salesman problem introduced by de Klerk, Pasechnik, and Sotirov [8] and show that their relaxation has an unbounded integrality gap. In particular, we give a family of instances such that the gap increases linearly with $n$. To obtain this result, we search for feasible solutions within a highly structured class of matrices; the problem of finding such solutions reduces to finding feasible solutions for a related linear program, which we do analytically. The solutions we find imply the unbounded integrality gap. Further, they impl…
The Steiner Traveling Salesman Problem (STSP) is a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) that is particularly suitable when dealing with sparse networks, such as road networks. The standard integer programming formulation of the STSP has an exponential number of constraints, just like the standard formulation of the TSP. On the other hand, there exist several known {\em compact} formulations of the TSP, i.e., formulations with a polynomial number of both variables and constraints. In this paper, we show that some of these compact formulations can be adapted to the STSP. We also brief…
Gottschalk and Vygen proved that every solution of the subtour elimination linear program for traveling salesman paths is a convex combination of more and more restrictive "generalized Gao-trees". We give a short proof of this fact, as a layered convex combination of bases of a sequence of increasingly restrictive matroids. A strongly polynomial, combinatorial algorithm follows for finding this convex combination, which is a new tool offering polyhedral insight, already instrumental in recent results for the $s-t$ path TSP.
Many recent approximation algorithms for different variants of the traveling salesman problem (asymmetric TSP, graph TSP, s-t-path TSP) exploit the well-known fact that a solution of the natural linear programming relaxation can be written as convex combination of spanning trees. The main argument then is that randomly sampling a tree from such a distribution and then completing the tree to a tour at minimum cost yields a better approximation guarantee than simply taking a minimum cost spanning tree (as in Christofides' algorithm). We argue that an additional step can help: reassembling the sp…
We consider the integrality gap of the subtour LP relaxation of the Traveling Salesman Problem restricted to circulant instances. De Klerk and Dobre conjectured that the value of the optimal solution to the subtour LP on these instances is equal to an entirely combinatorial lower bound from Van der Veen, Van Dal, and Sierksma. We prove this conjecture by giving an explicit optimal solution to the subtour LP. We then use it to show that the integrality gap of the subtour LP is 2 on circulant instances, making such instances one of the few non-trivial classes of TSP instances for which the integ…
In this paper, we present a new linear programming (LP) formulation of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The proposed model has O(n^8) variables and O(n^7) constraints, where n is the number of cities. Our numerical experimentation shows that computational times for the proposed linear program are several orders of magnitude smaller than those for the existing model [3].
The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a fundamental problem in combinatorial optimization. Several semidefinite programming relaxations have been proposed recently that exploit a variety of mathematical structures including, e.g., algebraic connectivity, permutation matrices, and association schemes. The main results of this paper are twofold. First, de Klerk and Sotirov [9] present an SDP based on permutation matrices and symmetry reduction; they show that it is incomparable to the subtour elimination linear program, but generally dominates it on small instances. We provide a family of \emp…
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…
In this paper, we present a polynomial-sized linear programming formulation of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The proposed linear program is a network flow-based model. Numerical implementation issues and results are discussed. (The exposition and proofs are much more detailed in an edition which I wrote in collaboration with Dr. M.H. Karwan in 2012-2014 . That edition is available at http://users.business.uconn.edu/mdiaby/P=NPProofPapers/tspPaper.pdf)
Air Force Research Laboratory（空军研究实验室）；Texas A & M University（得克萨斯农工大学）
The Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem (DTSP) has generated significant interest over the last decade due to its occurrence in several civil and military surveillance applications. Currently, there is no algorithm that can find an optimal solution to the problem. In addition, relaxing the motion constraints and solving the resulting Euclidean TSP (ETSP) provides the only lower bound available for the problem. However, in many problem instances, the lower bound computed by solving the ETSP is far below the cost of the feasible solutions obtained by some well-known algorithms for the DTSP. This a…
We show that the classical LP relaxation of the asymmetric traveling salesman path problem (ATSPP) has constant integrality ratio. If $ρ_{\text{ATSP}}$ and $ρ_{\text{ATSPP}}$ denote the integrality ratios for the asymmetric TSP and its path version, then $ρ_{\text{ATSPP}}\le 4ρ_{\text{ATSP}}-3$. We prove an even better bound for node-weighted instances: if the integrality ratio for ATSP on node-weighted instances is $ρ_{\text{ATSP}}^{\text{NW}}$, then the integrality ratio for ATSPP on node-weighted instances is at most $2ρ_{\text{ATSP}}^{\text NW}-1$. Moreover, we show that for ATSP node-weig…
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…
The $k-$traveling salesman problem ($k$-TSP) seeks a tour of minimal length that visits a subset of $k\leq n$ points. The traveling repairman problem (TRP) seeks a complete tour with minimal latency. This paper provides constant-factor probabilistic approximations of both problems. We first show that the optimal length of the $k$-TSP path grows at a rate of $Θ\left(k/n^{\frac{1}{2}\left(1+\frac{1}{k-1}\right)}\right)$. The proof provides a constant-factor approximation scheme, which solves a TSP in a high-concentration zone -- leveraging large deviations of local concentrations. Then, we show …
We consider the bicriteria asymmetric traveling salesman problem (bi-ATSP). Optimal solution to a multicriteria problem is usually supposed to be the Pareto set, which is rather wide in real-world problems. We apply to the bi-ATSP the axiomatic approach of the Pareto set reduction proposed by V. Noghin. We identify series of "quanta of information" that guarantee the reduction of the Pareto set for particular cases of the bi-ATSP. An approximation of the Pareto set to the bi-ATSP is constructed by a new multi-objective genetic algorithm. The experimental evaluation carried out in this paper sh…
In this paper, an iterative algorithm is designed to compute the sparse graphs for traveling salesman problem (TSP) according to the frequency quadrilaterals so that the computation time of the algorithms for TSP will be lowered. At each computation cycle, the algorithm first computes the average frequency \bar{f}(e) of an edge e with N frequency quadrilaterals containing e in the input graph G(V,E). Then the 1/3|E| edges with low frequency are eliminated to generate the output graph with a smaller number of edges. The algorithm can be iterated several times and the original optimal Hamiltonia…
Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI), Hamad bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔环境与能源研究所）；State University of Novi Pazar（新帕扎尔州立大学）；University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso（瓦尔帕莱索天主教大学）
In this paper we present a new population based metaheuristic called the fixed set search (FSS). The proposed approach represents a method of adding a learning mechanism to the greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP). The basic concept of FSS is to avoid focusing on specific high quality solutions but on parts or elements that such solutions have. This is done through fixing a set of elements that exist in such solutions and dedicating computational effort to finding near optimal solutions for the underlying subproblem. The simplicity of implementing the proposed method is illustra…
The Integrality Gap of the Traveling Salesman Problem is $4/3$ if the LP Solution Has at Most $n+6$ Non-zero Components
Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana (SUPSI)（瑞士意大利语区应用科学大学）；Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence USI-SUPSI（USI-SUPSI 达莱莫勒人工智能研究所）；Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI)（瑞士意大利语区大学）
