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Travelling Salesman Problem

The document discusses the traveling salesman problem (TSP) where given a number of towns/locations, the goal is to find the shortest possible route that visits each town exactly once and returns to the starting point. It describes how the TSP is an important problem in combinatorial optimization. It also presents an algorithm called the tree shortcut algorithm that guarantees a solution within a factor of 2 of the optimal solution when costs satisfy the triangle inequality.

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183 views16 pages

Travelling Salesman Problem

The document discusses the traveling salesman problem (TSP) where given a number of towns/locations, the goal is to find the shortest possible route that visits each town exactly once and returns to the starting point. It describes how the TSP is an important problem in combinatorial optimization. It also presents an algorithm called the tree shortcut algorithm that guarantees a solution within a factor of 2 of the optimal solution when costs satisfy the triangle inequality.

Uploaded by

prithiks
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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9.

2
The Traveling
Salesman Problem
Let us return to the question of finding a
cheapest possible cycle through all the
given towns: We have n towns (points) in
the plane, and for any two of them we are
given the “cost” of connecting them directly.
We have to find a cycle with these nodes
such that the cost of the cycle (the sum of
the costs of its edges) is as small as possible.
This problem is one of the most
important in the area of combinatorial
optimization, the field dealing with
finding the best possible design in
various combinatorial situations, like
finding the optimal tree discussed in
the previous section.
Traveling Salesman Problem
Its name comes from the version of the
problem where a traveling salesman has to
visit all towns in a region and then return to
his home, and of course, he wants to
minimize his travel costs. It is clear that
mathematically, this is the same problem. It
is easy to imagine that one and the same
mathematical problem appears in
connection with designing optimal delivery
routes for mail, optimal routes for garbage
collection, etc.
The following important question leads to the
same mathematical problem, except on an
entirely different scale. A machine has to drill a
number of holes in a printed circuit board (this
number could be in the thousands),and then
return to the starting point. In this case, the
important quantity is the time it takes to move the
drilling head from one hole to the next, since the
total time a given board has to spend on the
machine determines the number of boards that
can be processed in a day. So if we take the time
needed to move the head from one hole to
another as the “cost” of this edge, we need to find
a cycle with the holes as nodes, and with
minimum cost.
The Traveling Salesman Problem is closely
related to Hamiltonian cycles. First of all, a
traveling salesman tour is just a Hamiltonian
cycle in the complete graph on the given set
of nodes. But there is a more interesting
connection: The problem of whether a
given graph has a Hamiltonian cycle can be
reduced to the Traveling Salesman Problem.
Let G be a graph with n nodes. We define the
“distance” of two nodes as follows: adjacent
nodes have distance 1; nonadjacent nodes have
distance 2.

What do we know about the Traveling Salesman


Problem on the set of nodes of G with this new
distance function? If the graph contains a
Hamiltonian cycle, then this is a traveling salesman
tour of length n. If the graph has no Hamiltonian
cycle, then the shortest traveling salesman tour
has length at least n + 1.
This shows that any algorithm that solves
the Traveling Salesman Problem can be
used to decide whether or not a given graph
has a Hamiltonian cycle.
we want to show at least one simple algorithm that,
even though it does not give the best solution, never
loses more than a factor of 2. We describe this
algorithm in the case where the cost of an edge is just
its length, but it would not make any difference to
consider any other measure (like time, or the price of
a ticket), as long as the costs c(ij) satisfy the
triangle inequality:

c(ij) + c(jk) ≥ c(ik).


So we find the cheapest tree T, with total cost c. One thing we
can do is to walk around the tree just as we did when
constructing the “planar code” of a tree in the proof of Theorem
8.5.1 (see Figure 8.6). This certainly gives a walk that goes
through each town at least once, and returns to the starting
point. Of course, this walk may pass through some of the towns
more than once. But this is good for us: We can make shortcuts.
If the walk takes us from I to j to k, and we have seen j already,
we can proceed directly from i to k. Doing such shortcuts as long
as we can, we end up with a tour that goes through every town
exactly once (Figure 9.3). Let us call the algorithm described
above the Tree Shortcut Algorithm.
Theorem 9.2.1

If the costs in a Traveling Salesman Problem


satisfy the triangle inequality, then the Tree
Shortcut Algorithm finds a tour that costs
less than twice as much as the optimum
tour.
Proof
The cost of the walk around the tree is
exactly twice the cost c of T, since we used
every edge twice. The triangle inequality
guarantees that we have only shortened our
walk by doing shortcuts, so the cost of the
tour we found is not more than twice the
cost of the cheapest spanning tree.
But we want to relate the cost of the tour we
obtained to the cost of the optimum tour, not to
the cost of the optimum spanning tree! Well, this
is easy now: The cost of a cheapest spanning tree
is always less than the cost of the cheapest tour.
Why? Because we can omit any edge of the
cheapest tour to get a spanning tree. This is a very
special kind of tree (a path),and as a spanning tree
it mayor may not be optimal. However, its cost is
certainly not smaller than the cost of the cheapest
tree, but smaller than the cost of the optimal tour,
which proves the assertion above.
Since d>e>c and c’<2c
So c’<2d
To sum up, the cost of the tour we
constructed is at most twice that of
the cheapest spanning tree, which
in turn is less than twice the cost of
a cheapest tour.

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