Insights into the application of the traveling salesman problem to logistics without considering financial risk: A bibliometric study

Suppliers can use different strategies to distribute their products, Among the most common complex optimization problems related to the transportation of products is the traveling salesman problem. In the traveling-salesman problem, a route is chosen that visits each node exactly once, taking into account the shortest travel time, and finally returns to the original node. In this problem, all nodes must be visited. If we consider the application of this problem in logistics, we can study the necessity of this problem in transportation means such as trucks or drones. The upcoming paper is thoroughly studied and researched considering the related articles published in the last three decades, and bibliometric analysis is used for the details of this problem. This paper aims to statistically evaluate the influence and importance of the traveling salesman on logistics without considering financial risk by presenting an analysis of the works published between 1983 and 2023. As part of our comprehensive literature review table with analysis of export, we will conduct a comprehensive review of the most relevant articles in the field from 2020 to 2023 to better understand the trend in the subject in the last few years. Data were obtained from the Web of Science and focused on metrics such as the total number of publications, citations, average citations per publication, and trending countries. Graphical and statistical analysis was performed using Excel and R-Studio. China, the USA, and Germany are the countries with the most publications. Laporte is the most prolific author with 8 publications. Much research has been done on this topic, especially in the Journal of transportation research part E-logistic with 43 articles, and the main application areas are logistics, vehicles, and drones. These data may prove useful to researchers seeking an overview of the traveling salesman problem to determine future research directions