Abstract

We wish to bring to the attention of the OR community the phenomenon of phase transitions in randomly generated problems. These are of considerable practical use for benchmarking algorithms. They also offer insight into problem hardness and algorithm performance. Whilst phase transition experiments are frequently performed by AI researchers, such experiments do not appear to be in common use in the OR community. To illustrate the value of such experiments, we examine a typical OR problem, the traveling salesman problem. We report in detail many features of the phase transition in this problem, and show how some of these features are also seen in real problems. Acknowledgements The second author is supported by a HCM Postdoctoral Fellowship. We thank Iain Buchanan for comments on a draft of this paper, and Alan Bundy, and the members of the Mathematical Reasoning Group in Edinburgh for their constructive comments and many CPU cycles donated to these and other experiments from SERC grant GR/H/23610. We also thank the MRG group at Trento and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Strathclyde for additional CPU cycles. Finally, we thank Robert Craig for providing us with his code. 1

Citations