Professional Documents
Culture Documents
11 - Chapter 6 PDF
11 - Chapter 6 PDF
Chapter 6
TRAVELLING SALESMAN PROBLEM
6.1 Introduction
even some instances with only hundreds of cities will take many CPU years to
solve exactly.
The origins of the traveling salesman problem are unclear. A handbook for
traveling salesmen from 1832 mentions the problem and includes example tours
through Germany and Switzerland, but contains no mathematical treatment.
Hamilton (1800) and Kirkman (1800) expressed the concept of Mathematical
problems related to the travelling salesman problem. The general form of the
TSP appears to have been first studied by mathematicians notably by Menger
(1930). Further Menger (1930) also defines the problem related with salesman
ship based on brute-force algorithm, and observes the non-optimality of the
nearest neighbor heuristic. However Whitney (1930) introduced the name
travelling salesman problem.
During the period 1950 to 1960, the travelling salesman problem started
getting popularity in scientific circle is especially in Europe and the USA. Many
researchers like Dantzig, Fulkerson and Johnson (1954) at the RAND
Corporation in Santa Monica expressed the problem as an integer linear program
and developed the cutting plane method for its solution. With these new methods
they solved an instance with 49 cities to optimality by constructing a tour and
proving that no other tour could be shorter. In the following decades, the problem
was studied by many researchers from mathematics, science, chemistry,
physics, and other sciences. Karp (1972) showed that the Hamiltonian cycle
problem was NP-complete, which implies the NP-hardness of TSP. This supplied
a scientific explanation for the apparent computational difficulty of finding optimal
tours.
problem can be applied for Travelling Salesman Problem. For this we have
considered an example related with travelling salesman problem and explain in
detail how to find optimal solution using new alternate method of assignment
problem.
Example 6.2.1 A salesman has to visit five cities A.B, C, D and E. The distances
(in hundred kilometers) between the five cities are shown in Table 6.1.
Table 6.1
To city
A B C D E
A - 1 6 8 4
From B 7 - 8 5 6
City C 6 8 - 9 7
D 8 5 9 - 8
E 4 6 7 8 -
If the salesman starts from city A and has to come back to city A, which route
should he select so that total distance traveled become minimum?
Solution
Consider the effective matrix. This is shown in Table 6.2.
Table 6.2
To city
A B C D E
A - 1 6 8 4
From B 7 - 8 5 6
City C 6 8 - 9 7
D 8 5 9 - 8
E 4 6 7 8 -
In this matrix first, we will take first row which is referred a city. We select that
column (assignment) for which it contains minimum distance. For this example,
incase of first row, column B (assignment) has the minimum value. In the similar
way, we select all the rows and find the minimum value for the respective
columns. These are given in Table 6.3.
101
Table 6.3
Column 1(City) Colum 2(Assignment)
A B
B D
C A
D B
E A
In this table, we observed that assignment D occur only once with city B. That is
city B is unique for city D and hence we assign city B to D. This is shown in Table
6.4.
Table 6.4
A B C D E
A - 1 6 8 4
B 7 - 8 5 6
C 6 8 - 9 7
D 8 5 9 - 8
E 4 6 7 8 -
However, for other job assignment occur more than once. Hence they are not
unique. So how other job will be assigned further we discuss below.
Next delete row B and column D. Again select minimum cost value for the
remaining cities which is shown below Table 6.5.
Table 6.5
Column 1(City) Colum 2(Assignment)
A B
C A
D B
E A
Since assignment B occur with city A and D. Hence first we take the difference
between the value of B and next minimum value (here tie is happens). Here
102
Next delete row A and column B. Again select minimum cost value for the
remaining cities which is shown below Table 6.7.
Table 6.7
Column 1(City) Colum 2(Assignment)
C A
D A, E
E A
Since assignment A occur with city C, D and E. Hence we take the difference
between the value of A and next minimum value, here the maximum difference is
3 for Job E. And hence we assign A to city E. This is shown in Table 6.8.
Table 6.8
A C E
C 6 - 7
D 8 9 8
E 4 7 -
Next delete row E and column A. Again select minimum cost value for the
remaining cities which is shown below Table 6.9.
Table 6.9
Column 1(City) Column 2(Assignment)
C E
D E
103
6.3 Conclusion