223 research outputs found
Approximating ATSP by Relaxing Connectivity
The standard LP relaxation of the asymmetric traveling salesman problem has
been conjectured to have a constant integrality gap in the metric case. We
prove this conjecture when restricted to shortest path metrics of node-weighted
digraphs. Our arguments are constructive and give a constant factor
approximation algorithm for these metrics. We remark that the considered case
is more general than the directed analog of the special case of the symmetric
traveling salesman problem for which there were recent improvements on
Christofides' algorithm.
The main idea of our approach is to first consider an easier problem obtained
by significantly relaxing the general connectivity requirements into local
connectivity conditions. For this relaxed problem, it is quite easy to give an
algorithm with a guarantee of 3 on node-weighted shortest path metrics. More
surprisingly, we then show that any algorithm (irrespective of the metric) for
the relaxed problem can be turned into an algorithm for the asymmetric
traveling salesman problem by only losing a small constant factor in the
performance guarantee. This leaves open the intriguing task of designing a
"good" algorithm for the relaxed problem on general metrics.Comment: 25 pages, 2 figures, fixed some typos in previous versio
Improving the Asymmetric TSP by Considering Graph Structure
Recent works on cost based relaxations have improved Constraint Programming
(CP) models for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). We provide a short survey
over solving asymmetric TSP with CP. Then, we suggest new implied propagators
based on general graph properties. We experimentally show that such implied
propagators bring robustness to pathological instances and highlight the fact
that graph structure can significantly improve search heuristics behavior.
Finally, we show that our approach outperforms current state of the art
results.Comment: Technical repor
Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Path and Directed Latency Problems
We study integrality gaps and approximability of two closely related problems
on directed graphs. Given a set V of n nodes in an underlying asymmetric metric
and two specified nodes s and t, both problems ask to find an s-t path visiting
all other nodes. In the asymmetric traveling salesman path problem (ATSPP), the
objective is to minimize the total cost of this path. In the directed latency
problem, the objective is to minimize the sum of distances on this path from s
to each node. Both of these problems are NP-hard. The best known approximation
algorithms for ATSPP had ratio O(log n) until the very recent result that
improves it to O(log n/ log log n). However, only a bound of O(sqrt(n)) for the
integrality gap of its linear programming relaxation has been known. For
directed latency, the best previously known approximation algorithm has a
guarantee of O(n^(1/2+eps)), for any constant eps > 0. We present a new
algorithm for the ATSPP problem that has an approximation ratio of O(log n),
but whose analysis also bounds the integrality gap of the standard LP
relaxation of ATSPP by the same factor. This solves an open problem posed by
Chekuri and Pal [2007]. We then pursue a deeper study of this linear program
and its variations, which leads to an algorithm for the k-person ATSPP (where k
s-t paths of minimum total length are sought) and an O(log n)-approximation for
the directed latency problem
A near-optimal approximation algorithm for Asymmetric TSP on embedded graphs
We present a near-optimal polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the
asymmetric traveling salesman problem for graphs of bounded orientable or
non-orientable genus. Our algorithm achieves an approximation factor of O(f(g))
on graphs with genus g, where f(n) is the best approximation factor achievable
in polynomial time on arbitrary n-vertex graphs. In particular, the
O(log(n)/loglog(n))-approximation algorithm for general graphs by Asadpour et
al. [SODA 2010] immediately implies an O(log(g)/loglog(g))-approximation
algorithm for genus-g graphs. Our result improves the
O(sqrt(g)*log(g))-approximation algorithm of Oveis Gharan and Saberi [SODA
2011], which applies only to graphs with orientable genus g; ours is the first
approximation algorithm for graphs with bounded non-orientable genus.
Moreover, using recent progress on approximating the genus of a graph, our
O(log(g) / loglog(g))-approximation can be implemented even without an
embedding when the input graph has bounded degree. In contrast, the
O(sqrt(g)*log(g))-approximation algorithm of Oveis Gharan and Saberi requires a
genus-g embedding as part of the input.
Finally, our techniques lead to a O(1)-approximation algorithm for ATSP on
graphs of genus g, with running time 2^O(g)*n^O(1)
TSP--Infrastructure for the Traveling Salesperson Problem
The traveling salesperson (or, salesman) problem (TSP) is a well known and important combinatorial optimization problem. The goal is to find the shortest tour that visits each city in a given list exactly once and then returns to the starting city. Despite this simple problem statement, solving the TSP is difficult since it belongs to the class of NP-complete problems. The importance of the TSP arises besides from its theoretical appeal from the variety of its applications. Typical applications in operations research include vehicle routing, computer wiring, cutting wallpaper and job sequencing. The main application in statistics is combinatorial data analysis, e.g., reordering rows and columns of data matrices or identifying clusters. In this paper, we introduce the R package TSP which provides a basic infrastructure for handling and solving the traveling salesperson problem. The package features S3 classes for specifying a TSP and its (possibly optimal) solution as well as several heuristics to find good solutions. In addition, it provides an interface to Concorde, one of the best exact TSP solvers currently available.
How to make a greedy heuristic for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem competitive
It is widely confirmed by many computational experiments that a greedy type heuristics for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) produces rather poor solutions except for the Euclidean TSP. The selection of arcs to be included by a greedy heuristic is usually done on the base of cost values. We propose to use upper tolerances of an optimal solution to one of the relaxed Asymmetric TSP (ATSP) to guide the selection of an arc to be included in the final greedy solution. Even though it needs time to calculate tolerances, our computational experiments for the wide range of ATSP instances show that tolerance based greedy heuristics is much more accurate an faster than previously reported greedy type algorithms
- …