Review of Solution Approaches for the Symmetric Traveling Salesman Problem

Abstract

In this paper, the main known exact and heuristic solution approaches and algorithms for the symmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), published after 1992, are surveyed. The paper categorize the most important existing algorithm to 6 main groups: i) Genetic algorithms, ii) Ant colony methods, iii) Neural Methods, iv) Local search algorithms and Tabu search, v) Lagrangian methods and vi) Branch and bound and branch & cut algorithms.