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Cited by 1,058

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An Algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem

Open access
Little, John D. C., Murty, Katta G., Sweeney, Dura W., Karel, Caroline·1963·Operations Research

Abstract

A “branch and bound” algorithm is presented for solving the traveling salesman problem. The set of all tours (feasible solutions) is broken up into increasingly small subsets by a procedure called branching. For each subset a lower bound on the length of the tours therein is calculated. Eventually, a subset is found that contains a single tour whose length is less than or equal to some lower bound for every tour. The motivation of the branching and the calculation of the lower bounds are based on ideas frequently used in solving assignment problems. Computationally, the algorithm extends the size of problem that can reasonably be solved without using methods special to the particular problem.

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Metadata

Authors
Little, J. D. C., Murty, K. G., Sweeney, D. W., & Karel, C.
Venue
Operations Research
Published
1963-12
Volume
11
Issue
6
Pages
972-989
ISSN
  • 0030-364X (ISSN-L)
  • 1526-5463
OpenAlex
W2123241324
Cited by
1,058
References
0
FWCI
176.75
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: An Algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1287/opre.11.6.972
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Little, J. D. C., Murty, K. G., Sweeney, D. W., & Karel, C. (1963). An Algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem. Operations Research. https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.11.6.972

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.