Travelling salesman problem

In the theory of computational complexity, the travelling salesman problem asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?" It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, important in theoretical computer science and operations research.
The travelling purchaser problem, the vehicle routing problem and the ring star problem are three generalizations of TSP.
The decision version of the TSP belongs to the class of NP-complete problems. Thus, it is possible that the worst-case running time for any algorithm for the TSP increases superpolynomially with the number of cities.
The problem was first formulated in 1930 and is one of the most intensively studied problems in optimization. It is used as a benchmark for many optimization methods. Even though the problem is computationally difficult, many heuristics and exact algorithms are known, so that some instances with tens of thousands of cities can be solved completely, and even problems with millions of cities can be approximated within a small fraction of 1%.
The TSP has several applications even in its purest formulation, such as planning, logistics, and the manufacture of microchips. Slightly modified, it appears as a sub-problem in many areas, such as DNA sequencing. In these applications, the concept city represents, for example, customers, soldering points, or DNA fragments, and the concept distance represents travelling times or cost, or a similarity measure between DNA fragments. The TSP also appears in astronomy, as astronomers observing many sources want to minimize the time spent moving the telescope between the sources; in such problems, the TSP can be embedded inside an optimal control problem. In many applications, additional constraints such as limited resources or time windows may be imposed.

History

The origins of the travelling salesman problem are unclear. A handbook for travelling salesmen from 1832 mentions the problem and includes example tours through Germany and Switzerland, but contains no mathematical treatment.
The TSP was mathematically formulated in the 19th century by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton and by the British mathematician Thomas Kirkman. Hamilton's icosian game was a recreational puzzle based on finding a Hamiltonian cycle. The general form of the TSP appears to have been first studied by mathematicians during the 1930s in Vienna and at Harvard, notably by Karl Menger, who defines the problem, considers the obvious brute-force algorithm, and observes the non-optimality of the nearest neighbour heuristic:
It was first considered mathematically in the 1930s by Merrill M. Flood, who was looking to solve a school bus routing problem. Hassler Whitney at Princeton University generated interest in the problem, which he called the "48 states problem". The earliest publication using the phrase "travelling salesman problem" was the 1949 RAND Corporation report by Julia Robinson, "On the Hamiltonian game."
In the 1950s and 1960s, the problem became increasingly popular in scientific circles in Europe and the United States after the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica offered prizes for steps in solving the problem. Notable contributions were made by George Dantzig, Delbert Ray Fulkerson, and Selmer M. Johnson from the RAND Corporation, who expressed the problem as an integer linear program and developed the cutting plane method for its solution. They wrote what is considered the seminal paper on the subject in which, with these new methods, they solved an instance with 49 cities to optimality by constructing a tour and proving that no other tour could be shorter. Dantzig, Fulkerson, and Johnson, however, speculated that, given a near-optimal solution, one may be able to find optimality or prove optimality by adding a small number of extra inequalities. They used this idea to solve their initial 49-city problem using a string model. They found they only needed 26 cuts to come to a solution for their 49 city problem. While this paper did not give an algorithmic approach to TSP problems, the ideas that lay within it were indispensable to later creating exact solution methods for the TSP, though it would take 15 years to find an algorithmic approach in creating these cuts. As well as cutting plane methods, Dantzig, Fulkerson, and Johnson used branch-and-bound algorithms perhaps for the first time.
In 1959, Jillian Beardwood, J.H. Halton, and John Hammersley published an article entitled "The Shortest Path Through Many Points" in the journal of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. The Beardwood–Halton–Hammersley theorem provides a practical solution to the travelling salesman problem. The authors derived an asymptotic formula to determine the length of the shortest route for a salesman who starts at a home or office and visits a fixed number of locations before returning to the start.
In the following decades, the problem was studied by many researchers from mathematics, computer science, chemistry, physics, and other sciences. In the 1960s, however, a new approach was created that, instead of seeking optimal solutions, would produce a solution whose length is provably bounded by a multiple of the optimal length, and in doing so would create lower bounds for the problem; these lower bounds would then be used with branch-and-bound approaches. One method of doing this was to create a minimum spanning tree of the graph and then double all its edges, which produces the bound that the length of an optimal tour is at most twice the weight of a minimum spanning tree.
In 1976, Christofides and Serdyukov made a big advance in this direction: the Christofides–Serdyukov algorithm yields a solution that, in the worst case, is at most 1.5 times longer than the optimal solution. As the algorithm was simple and quick, many hoped it would give way to a near-optimal solution method. However, this hope for improvement did not immediately materialize, and the Christofides–Serdyukov algorithm remained the method with the best worst-case scenario until 2011, when a slightly improved approximation algorithm was developed for the subset of "graphical" TSPs. In 2020, this tiny improvement was extended to the full TSP.
Richard M. Karp showed in 1972 that the Hamiltonian cycle problem was NP-complete, which implies the NP-hardness of TSP. This supplied a mathematical explanation for the apparent computational difficulty of finding optimal tours.
Great progress was made in the late 1970s and 1980, when Grötschel, Padberg, Rinaldi and others managed to exactly solve instances with up to 2,392 cities, using cutting planes and branch-and-bound.
In the 1990s, Applegate, Bixby, Chvátal, and Cook developed the program Concorde that has been used in many recent record solutions. Gerhard Reinelt published the TSPLIB in 1991, a collection of benchmark instances of varying difficulty, which has been used by many research groups for comparing results. In 2006, Cook and others computed an optimal tour through an 85,900-city instance given by a microchip layout problem, currently the largest solved TSPLIB instance. For many other instances with millions of cities, solutions can be found that are guaranteed to be within 2–3% of an optimal tour.

Description

As a graph problem

TSP can be modeled as an undirected weighted graph, such that cities are the graph's vertices, paths are the graph's edges, and a path's distance is the edge's weight. It is a minimization problem starting and finishing at a specified vertex after having visited each other vertex exactly once. Often, the model is a complete graph. If no path exists between two cities, then adding a sufficiently long edge will complete the graph without affecting the optimal tour.

Asymmetric and symmetric

In the symmetric TSP, the distance between two cities is the same in each opposite direction, forming an undirected graph. This symmetry halves the number of possible solutions. In the asymmetric TSP, paths may not exist in both directions or the distances might be different, forming a directed graph. Traffic congestion, one-way streets, and airfares for cities with different departure and arrival fees are real-world considerations that could yield a TSP problem in asymmetric form.

Travelling salesman problem

History

Description

As a graph problem

Asymmetric and symmetric

Related problems