A Labelling Method for the Travelling Salesman Problem

Abstract

The travelling salesman problem (TSP) is a problem whereby a finite number of nodes are supposed to be visited exactly once, one after the other, in such a way that the total weight of connecting arcs used to visit these nodes is minimized. We propose a labelling method to solve the TSP problem. The algorithm terminates after K−1 iterations, where K is the total number of nodes in the network. The algorithm’s design allows it to determine alternative tours if there are any in the TSP network. The computational complexity of the algorithm reduces as iterations increase, thereby making it a powerful and efficient algorithm. Numerical illustrations are used to prove the efficiency and validity of the proposed algorithm.