Symmetric traveling salesman problem
Given a set of n nodes and distances for each pair of nodes, find a roundtrip of minimal total length visiting each node exactly once. The distance from node i to node j is the same as from node j to node i.
Asymmetric traveling salesman problem
Given a set of n nodes and distances for each pair of nodes, find a roundtrip of minimal total length visiting each node exactly once. In this case, the distance from node i to node j and the distance from node j to node i may be different.
The TSP is the problem of a salesman who wants to find, starting from his home town, a shortest possible trip through a given set of customer cities and to return to his home town.
The method developed incorporates message parsing between nodes. This is implemented as dilating circles centred on each node. A temporal delay is introduced to improve results and a genetic algorithm inplemented to find a shorter ('fitter') route.
All the TSP instances we have used are taken from the TSLIB Benchmark Library which contains a large collection of instances; these have been used in many other studies or stem from practical applications of the TSP.
