Related papers: Lower bounds for the universal TSP on the plane
In the Euclidean TSP with neighborhoods (TSPN), we are given a collection of $n$ regions (neighborhoods) and we seek a shortest tour that visits each region. In the path variant, we seek a shortest path that visits each region. We present…
Given a set $P$ of $n$ points with their pairwise distances, the traveling salesman problem (TSP) asks for a shortest tour that visits each point exactly once. A TSP instance is rectilinear when the points lie in the plane and the distance…
We revisit the traveling salesman problem with neighborhoods (TSPN) and propose several new approximation algorithms. These constitute either first approximations (for hyperplanes, lines, and balls in $\mathbb{R}^d$, for $d\geq 3$) or…
Let $X$ be an $n$-element point set in the $k$-dimensional unit cube $[0,1]^k$ where $k \geq 2$. According to an old result of Bollob\'as and Meir (1992), there exists a cycle (tour) $x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n$ through the $n$ points, such that…
We study the traveling salesman problem in the hyperbolic plane of Gaussian curvature $-1$. Let $\alpha$ denote the minimum distance between any two input points. Using a new separator theorem and a new rerouting argument, we give an…
The $k$-Opt heuristic is a simple improvement heuristic for the Traveling Salesman Problem. It starts with an arbitrary tour and then repeatedly replaces $k$ edges of the tour by $k$ other edges, as long as this yields a shorter tour. We…
We propose that the statistics of the optimal tour in the planar random Euclidean traveling salesman problem is conformally invariant on large scales. This is exhibited in power-law behavior of the probabilities for the tour to zigzag…
Given any $n \in \mathbb{Z}^{+}$, we constructively prove the existence of covering paths and circuits in the plane which are characterized by the same link length of the minimum-link covering trails for the two-dimensional grid $G_n^2 :=…
The Covering Salesman Problem (CSP) is a generalization of the Traveling Salesman Problem in which the tour is not required to visit all vertices, as long as all vertices are covered by the tour. The objective of CSP is to find a minimum…
The asymptotic behavior of the optimal TSP tour length is well known from the classical Beardwood--Halton--Hammersley theorem. We extend this result to the Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone (TSPD), a cooperative routing problem in which…
Let $X_1, X_2, \dots, X_n$ be independent and uniformly distributed random variables in the unit square $[0,1]^2$ and let $L(X_1, \dots, X_n)$ be the length of the shortest traveling salesman path through these points. In 1959, Beardwood,…
We study the variant of the Euclidean Traveling Salesman problem where instead of a set of points, we are given a set of lines as input, and the goal is to find the shortest tour that visits each line. The best known upper and lower bounds…
We present a very simple family of traveling salesman instances with $n$ cities where the nearest neighbor rule may produce a tour that is $\Theta(\log n)$ times longer than an optimum solution. Our family works for the graphic, the…
We consider the traveling salesman problem when the cities are points in R^d for some fixed d and distances are computed according to geometric distances, determined by some norm. We show that for any polyhedral norm, the problem of finding…
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…
The Traveling Salesperson problem asks for the shortest cyclic tour visiting a set of cities given their pairwise distances and belongs to the NP-hard complexity class, which means that with all known algorithms in the worst case instances…
We give unconditional parameterized complexity lower bounds on pure dynamic programming algorithms - as modeled by tropical circuits - for connectivity problems such as the Traveling Salesperson Problem. Our lower bounds are higher than the…
If one places N cities randomly on a lattice of size L, we find that the normalized optimal travel distances per city in the Euclidean and Manhattan metrics vary monotonically with the city concentration p. We have studied such optimal…
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the classic and hard problems in combinatorial optimization. We develop a new heuristic that uses a connection between Minimum Cost Flow Problems and the TSP to improve on a given suboptimal…
The 2-Opt heuristic is a simple improvement heuristic for the Traveling Salesman Problem. It starts with an arbitrary tour and then repeatedly replaces two edges of the tour by two other edges, as long as this yields a shorter tour. We will…