Good triangulations yield good tours

Letchford, A N and Pearson, N (2008) Good triangulations yield good tours. Computers and Operations Research, 35 (2). pp. 638-647. ISSN 0305-0548

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Abstract

Consider the following heuristic for planar Euclidean instances of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP): select a subset of the edges which induces a planar graph, and solve either the TSP or its graphical relaxation on that graph. In this paper, we give several motivations for considering this heuristic, along with extensive computational results. It turns out that the Delaunay and greedy triangulations make effective choices for the induced planar graph. Indeed, our experiments show that the resulting tours are on average within 0.1% of optimality.