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Effective Tour Searching for TSP by Contraction of Pseudo Backbone Edges

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Algorithmic Aspects in Information and Management (AAIM 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5564))

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Abstract

We introduce a reduction technique for the well-known TSP. The basic idea of the approach consists of transforming a TSP instance to another one with smaller size by contracting pseudo backbone edges computed in a preprocessing step, where pseudo backbone edges are edges which are likely to be in an optimal tour. A tour of the small instance can be re-transformed to a tour of the original instance. We experimentally investigated TSP benchmark instances by our reduction technique combined with the currently leading TSP heuristic of Helsgaun. The results strongly demonstrate the effectivity of this reduction technique: for the six VLSI instances xvb13584, pjh17845, fnc19402, ido21215, boa28924, and fht47608 we could set world records, i.e., find better tours than the best tours known so far. The success of this approach is mainly due to the effective reduction of the problem size so that we can search the more important tour subspace more intensively.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Institute, University of Halle-Wittenberg, D-06120, Halle (Saale), Germany

    Changxing Dong, Gerold Jäger, Dirk Richter & Paul Molitor

Authors
  1. Changxing Dong
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  2. Gerold Jäger
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  3. Dirk Richter
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  4. Paul Molitor
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research – Silicon Valley, 1065 La Avenida, Mountain View, CA 94062, USA

    Andrew V. Goldberg

  2. Rocket Fuel Inc., 350 Marine Parkway, CA 94065, Marina Park Center, USA

    Yunhong Zhou

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Dong, C., Jäger, G., Richter, D., Molitor, P. (2009). Effective Tour Searching for TSP by Contraction of Pseudo Backbone Edges. In: Goldberg, A.V., Zhou, Y. (eds) Algorithmic Aspects in Information and Management. AAIM 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5564. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02158-9_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02158-9_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02157-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02158-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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