The multi-stripe travelling salesman problem

Abstract

In the classical Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), the objective function sums the costs for travelling from one city to the next city along the tour. In the q-stripe TSP with q≥ 1 , the objective function sums the costs for travelling from one city to each of the next q cities in the tour. The resulting q-stripe TSP generalizes the TSP and forms a special case of the quadratic assignment problem. We analyze the computational complexity of the q-stripe TSP for various classes of specially structured distance matrices. We derive NP-hardness results as well as polynomially solvable cases. One of our main results generalizes a well-known theorem of Kalmanson from the classical TSP to the q-stripe TSP.