Ebook: The Traveling Salesman: Computational Solutions for TSP Applications

Still today I am receiving requests for reprints of the book, but unfortunately it is out of print. Therefore, since the book still seems to receive some attention, I p- posed to Springer Verlag to provide a free online edition. I am very happy that Springer agreed. Except for the correction of some typographical errors, the online edition is just a copy of the printed version, no updates have been made. In particular, Table 13.1 gives the status of TSPLIB at the time of publishing the book. For accessing TSPLIB the link http://www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/iwr/comopt/software/TSPLIB95/ should be used instead of following the procedure described in Chapter 13. Heidelberg, January 2001 Gerhard Reinelt Preface More than ?fteen years ago, I was faced with the following problem in an assignment for a class in computer science. A brewery had to deliver beer to ?ve stores, and the task was to write a computer program for determining the shortest route for the truck driver to visit all stores and return to the brewery. All my attemps to ?nd a reasonable algorithm failed, I could not help enumerating all possible routes and then select the best one.

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This book is devoted to the famous travelling salesman problem (TSP), which, is the task of finding a route of the shortest possible length through a given set of cities. The TSP attracts interest from several scientific communities and from numerous application areas. First the theoretical prerequisites are summarized. Then the emphasis shifts to computational solutions for practical TSP applications. Detailed computational experiments are used to show how to find good or acceptable routes for large problem instances in reasonable time. In total, this book meets a tremendous professional need for effective algorithms; it is the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey available on heuristic approaches to TSP solving.