Cooperative TSP

Amitai Armon*, Adi Avidor, Oded Schwartz

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper we introduce and study cooperative variants of the Traveling Salesperson Problem. In these problems a salesperson has to make deliveries to customers who are willing to help in the process. Customer cooperativeness may be manifested in several modes: they may assist by approaching the salesperson, by reselling the goods they purchased to other customers, or by doing both. Several objectives are of interest: minimizing the total distance traveled by all the participants, minimizing the maximal distance traveled by a participant and minimizing the total time until all the deliveries are made. All the combinations of cooperation-modes and objective functions are considered, both in weighted undirected graphs and in Euclidean space. We show that most of the problems have a constant approximation algorithm, many of the others admit a PTAS, and a few are solvable in polynomial time. On the intractability side we provide NP-hardness proofs and inapproximability factors, some of which are tight.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAlgorithms, ESA 2006 - 14th Annual European Symposium, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages40-51
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)3540388753, 9783540388753
DOIs
StatePublished - 2006
Externally publishedYes
Event14th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, ESA 2006 - Zurich, Switzerland
Duration: 11 Sep 200613 Sep 2006

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume4168 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference14th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, ESA 2006
Country/TerritorySwitzerland
CityZurich
Period11/09/0613/09/06

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