Finding Good Tours for Huge Euclidean TSP Instances by Iterative Backbone Contraction

Abstract. This paper presents an iterative, highly parallelizable approach to find good tours for very large instances of the Euclidian version of the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The basic idea of the approach consists of iteratively transforming the TSP instance to another one with smaller size by contracting pseudo backbone edges. The iteration is stopped, if the new TSP instance is small enough for directly applying an exact algorithm or an efficient TSP heuristic. The pseudo backbone edges of each iteration are computed by a window based technique in which the TSP instance is tiled in non-disjoint sub-instances. For each of these sub-instances a good tour is computed, independently of the other sub-instances. An edge which is contained in the computed tour of every sub-instance (of the current iteration) containing this edge is denoted to be a pseudo backbone edge. Paths of pseudo-backbone edges are contracted to single edges which are fixed during the subsequent...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: AAIM
• Authors: Christian Ernst, Changxing Dong, Gerold Jäger, Dirk Richter, Paul Molitor
• Keywords: AAIM 2010, Algorithms, Efficient Tsp, Pseudo Backbone Edge, TSP Instance