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The Traveling-Salesman Problem

Merrill M. Flood

Columbia University, New York, New York

Operations Research 1956

The traveling-salesman problem is that of finding a permutation P = (1 i2 i3 … in) of the integers from 1 through n that minimizes the quantity [Formula: see text] where the aαβ are a given set of real numbers. More accurately, since there are only (n − 1)′ possibilities to consider, the problem is to find an efficient method for choosing a minimizing permutation. This problem was posed, in 1934, by Hassler Whitney in a seminar talk at Princeton University. There are as yet no acceptable computational methods, and surprisingly few mathematical results relative to the problem.

DOI
10.1287/opre.4.1.61
Volume
4 (1)
Pages
61-75
Language
en
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