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The Traveling Salesman Problem

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Combinatorial Optimization

Part of the book series: Algorithms and Combinatorics ((AC,volume 21))

Abstract

In Chapter 15 we introduced the TRAVELING SALESMAN PROBLEM (TSP) and showed that it is NP-hard (Theorem 15.43). The TSP is perhaps the best-studied NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, and there are many techniques which have been applied. We start by discussing approximation algorithms in Sections 21.1 and 21.2. In practice, so-called local search algorithms (discussed in Section 21.3) find better solutions for large instances although they do not have a finite performance ratio.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics, University of Bonn, Lennéstr. 2, 53113, Bonn, Germany

    Bernhard Korte & Jens Vygen

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  1. Bernhard Korte
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  2. Jens Vygen
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Correspondence to Bernhard Korte .

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Korte, B., Vygen, J. (2012). The Traveling Salesman Problem. In: Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Combinatorics, vol 21. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24488-9_21

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