Following the theoretical studies of J.B. Robinson and H.W. Kuhn in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, G.B. Dantzig, R. Fulkerson, and S.M. Johnson demonstrated in 1954 that large instances of the TSP could be solved by linear programming. Their approach remains the only known tool for solving TSP instances with more than several hundred cities; over the years, it has evolved further through the work of M. Grötschel, S. Hong, M. Junger, P. Miliotis, D. Naddef, M. Padberg, W.R. Pulleyblank, G. Reinelt, G. Rinaldi, and others. We enumerate some of its refinements that led to the solution of a 13,509-city instance.

Abstract not found

This paper presents a set of techniques that makes constraint programming a technique of choice for solving small (up to 30 nodes) traveling salesman problems. These techniques include a propagation scheme to avoid intermediate cycles (a global constraint), a branching scheme and a redundant constraint that can be used as a bounding method. The resulting improvement is that we can solve problems twice larger than those solved previously with constraint programming tools. We evaluate the use of Lagrangean Relaxation to narrow the gap between constraint programming and other Operations Research techniques and we show that improved constraint propagation has now a place in the array of techniques that should be used to solve a traveling salesman problem. 1.

The first computer implementation of the Dantzig-Fulkerson-Johnson cutting-plane method for solving the traveling salesman problem, written by Martin, used subtour inequalities as well as cutting planes of Gomory’s type. The practice of looking for and using cuts that match prescribed templates in conjunction with Gomory cuts was continued in computer codes of Miliotis, Land, and Fleischmann. Grötschel, Padberg, and Hong advocated a different policy, where the template paradigm is the only source of cuts; furthermore, they argued for drawing the templates exclusively from the set of linear inequalities that induce facets of the TSP polytope. These policies were adopted in the work of Crowder and Padberg, in the work of Grötschel and Holland, and in the work of Padberg and Rinaldi; their computer codes produced the most impressive computational TSP successes of the nineteen eighties. Eventually, the template paradigm became the standard frame of reference for cutting planes in the TSP. The purpose of this paper is to describe a technique

Cutting plane algorithms have turned out to be practically successful computational tools in combinatorial optimization, in particular, when they are embedded in a branch and bound framework. Implementations of such "branch and cut" algorithms are rather complicated in comparison to many purely combinatorial algorithms. The purpose of this article is to give an introduction to cutting plane algorithms from an implementor's point of view. Special emphasis is given to control and data structures used in practically successful implementations of branch and cut algorithms. We also address the issue of parallelization. Finally, we point out that in important applications branch and cut algorithms are not only able to produce optimal solutions but also approximations to the optimum with certified good quality in moderate computation times. We close with an overview of successful practical applications in the literature.

We consider most of the known classes of valid inequalities for the graphical travelling salesman polyhedron and compute the worst-case improvement resulting from their addition to the subtour polyhedron. For example, we show that the comb inequalities cannot improve the subtour bound by a factor greater than ~. The corresponding factor for the class of clique tree inequalities is 8, while it is 4 for the path configuration inequalities. Keywords: Polyhedral combinatorics; Valid inequalities; Travelling salesman; Worst-case analysis 1.

More-dimensional orthogonal packing problems have a wide range of practical applications, including packing, cutting, and scheduling. Combining the use of our data structure for characterizing feasible packings with our new classes of lower bounds, and other heuristics, we develop a two-level tree search algorithm for solving more-dimensional packing problems to optimality. Computational results are reported, including optimal solutions for all two-dimensional test problems from recent literature. This is the third in a series of three articles describing new approaches to more-dimensional packing.

Higher-dimensional orthogonal packing problems have a wide range of practical applications, including packing, cutting, and scheduling. Combining the use of our data structure for characterizing feasible packings with our new classes of lower bounds, and other heuristics, we develop a two-level tree search algorithm for solving higher-dimensional packing problems to optimality. Computational results are reported, including optimal solutions for all two--dimensional test problems from recent literature.

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a benchmark problem in combinatorial optimization. It was one of the very first problems used for developing and testing approaches to solving large integer programs, including cutting plane algorithms and branch-and-cut algorithms. Much of the research in this area has been focused on finding new classes of facets for the TSP polytope, and much less attention has been paid to algorithms for separating from these classes of facets. In this paper, we consider the problem of finding violated comb inequalities. If there are no violated subtour constraints in a fractional solution of the TSP, a comb inequality may not be violated by more than 1. Given a fractional solution in the subtour elimination polytope whose graph is planar, we either find a violated comb inequality or determine that there are no comb inequalities violated by 1. Our algorithm runs in O(n + MC(n)) time, where MC(n) is the time to compute a cactus representation of all minimum cu...

Abstract not found