| Review: |
The travelling salesman problem (TSP) is perhaps the most well-known combinatorial optimization problem. The problem is to find the shortest route for a travelling salesman to set out from home, visit a set number of other cities and return home. TSP is a typically hard problem, but recent developments in polyhedral theory and branch-and-cut algebra have significantly increased the number of instances that can be solved to optimality. This book describes these and looks in detail at probabilistic aspects of TSP, computational analysis of heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms, theoretical analysis of approximation algorithms, discussion of TSP software and variations of TSP such as bottleneck TSP, generalized TSP, Prize collecting TSP, maximizing TSP, and orienteering problems. The 16 chapters are written by well-established researchers. |