Shortest Overall Distance

We’ve been working toward the solution to TSP by completing all the preparations and can finally come to our traveling salesperson’s rescue.

TSP is about reducing the cost function as much as possible. Simply put, it’s about keeping the total distance traveled on the closed route as small as possible. It’s what is called a combinatorial optimization problem. It’s NP-hard, meaning that finding an optimal solution for large problem instances is computationally challenging. Consequently, many heuristicsHeuristics for TSP are designed to quickly find a reasonably good solution that is close to the optimal solution, without necessarily finding the optimal solution itself. Heuristics work by exploring the search space of possible solutions in an intelligent and efficient manner, using techniques such as local search, greedy algorithms, and randomized algorithms. have been developed to find near-optimal solutions in a reasonable amount of time.

Solving TSP

For a brief recap, view the distance matrixA distance matrix is a matrix that represents the distances between a set of objects. The matrix contains the pairwise distances between every pair of objects in the set. for all stores.