Related papers: Approximating 1-dimensional TSP Requires Omega(n l…
The path version of the Traveling Salesman Problem is one of the most well-studied variants of the ubiquitous TSP. Its generalization, the Multi-Path TSP, has recently been used in the best known algorithm for path TSP by Traub and Vygen…
We present a physics inspired heuristic method for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Our approach is specifically motivated by the desire to avoid trapping in metastable local minima- a common occurrence in hard problems with…
The problem of deciding if a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) tour is minimal was proved to be coNP-complete by Papadimitriou and Steiglitz. We give an alternative proof based on a polynomial time reduction from 3SAT. Like the original…
We address a fundamental challenge in space mission design and space logistics: planning interplanetary trajectories for missions that must rendezvous with multiple bodies. Such mission occur, for instance, in active debris removal,…
What is the effectiveness of local search algorithms for geometric problems in the plane? We prove that local search with neighborhoods of magnitude $1/\epsilon^c$ is an approximation scheme for the following problems in the Euclidian…
We present a framework for approximating the metric TSP based on a novel use of matchings. Traditionally, matchings have been used to add edges in order to make a given graph Eulerian, whereas our approach also allows for the removal of…
The generalized traveling salesman problem (GTSP) is an extension of the well-known traveling salesman problem. In GTSP, we are given a partition of cities into groups and we are required to find a minimum length tour that includes exactly…
The Steiner Traveling Salesman Problem (STSP) is a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) that is particularly suitable when dealing with sparse networks, such as road networks. The standard integer programming formulation of the…
We study approximability of subdense instances of various covering problems on graphs, defined as instances in which the minimum or average degree is Omega(n/psi(n)) for some function psi(n)=omega(1) of the instance size. We design new…
Recent papers on approximation algorithms for the traveling salesman problem (TSP) have given a new variant on the well-known Christofides' algorithm for the TSP, called the Best-of-Many Christofides' algorithm. The algorithm involves…
Prize-Collecting TSP is a variant of the traveling salesperson problem where one may drop vertices from the tour at the cost of vertex-dependent penalties. The quality of a solution is then measured by adding the length of the tour and the…
Let $P$ and $Q$ be two simple polygons in the plane of total complexity $n$, each of which can be decomposed into at most $k$ convex parts. We present an $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm, for finding the translation of $Q$, which…
Given a traveling salesman problem (TSP) tour $H$ in graph $G$ a $k$-move is an operation which removes $k$ edges from $H$, and adds $k$ edges of $G$ so that a new tour $H'$ is formed. The popular $k$-OPT heuristics for TSP finds a local…
In the path version of the Travelling Salesman Problem (Path-TSP), a salesman is looking for the shortest Hamiltonian path through a set of n cities. The salesman has to start his journey at a given city s, visit every city exactly once,…
The bin packing problem is to find the minimum number of bins of size one to pack a list of items with sizes $a_1,..., a_n$ in $(0,1]$. Using uniform sampling, which selects a random element from the input list each time, we develop a…
The generalized traveling salesman problem (GTSP) is an extension of the well-known traveling salesman problem. In GTSP, we are given a partition of cities into groups and we are required to find a minimum length tour that includes exactly…
The traveling salesman problem (TSP) famously asks for a shortest tour that a salesperson can take to visit a given set of cities in any order. In this paper, we ask how much faster $k \ge 2$ salespeople can visit the cities if they divide…
Combinatorial optimization is the field devoted to the study and practice of algorithms that solve NP-hard problems. As Machine Learning (ML) and deep learning have popularized, several research groups have started to use ML to solve…
In this article, we present a novel formulation for the load-dependent traveling salesman problem (LD-TSP), in which travel cost (or energy expended) depends on the vehicle's current load. This problem is relevant for package delivery and…
The traveling tournament problem is a well-known benchmark problem of the sports scheduling. We propose an approximation algorithm for the traveling tournament problem with the constraints such that both the number of consecutive home games…