Abstract

An algorithm is described for solving large-scale instances of the Symmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (STSP) to optimality. The core of the algorithm is a “polyhedral” cutting-plane procedure that exploits a subset of the system of linear inequalities defining the convex hull of the incidence vectors of the hamiltonian cycles of a complete graph. The cuts are generated by several identification procedures that have been described in a companion paper. Whenever the cutting-plane procedure does not terminate with an optimal solution the algorithm uses a tree-search strategy that, as opposed to branch-and-bound, keeps on producing cuts after branching. The algorithm has been implemented in FORTRAN. Two different linear programming (LP) packages have been used as the LP solver. The implementation of the algorithm and the interface with one of the LP solvers is described in sufficient detail to permit the replication of our experiments. Computational results are reported with up to 42 STSPs with sizes ranging from 48 to 2,392 nodes. Most of the medium-sized test problems are taken from the literature; all others are large-scale real-world problems. All of the instances considered in this study were solved to optimality by the algorithm in “reasonable” computation times.

MSC codes

  1. 90C10
  2. 05C35
  3. 68E10
  4. 52A40

Keywords

  1. symmetric traveling salesman problem
  2. branch-and-cut
  3. scientific computation
  4. polyhedral theory
  5. facets
  6. cutting planes
  7. heuristics
  8. software development

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Information & Authors

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Published In

cover image SIAM Review
SIAM Review
Pages: 60 - 100
ISSN (online): 1095-7200

History

Submitted: 24 April 1989
Accepted: 7 June 1990
Published online: 18 July 2006

MSC codes

  1. 90C10
  2. 05C35
  3. 68E10
  4. 52A40

Keywords

  1. symmetric traveling salesman problem
  2. branch-and-cut
  3. scientific computation
  4. polyhedral theory
  5. facets
  6. cutting planes
  7. heuristics
  8. software development

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