A Comprehensive Survey on the Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem: Applications, Approaches and Taxonomy

Abstract

The Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem (MTSP) is among the most interesting combinatorial optimization problems because it is widely adopted in real-life applications, including robotics, transportation, networking, etc.Although the importance of this optimization problem, there is no survey dedicated to reviewing recent MTSP contributions. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive review of existing studies on MTSP. In this survey, we focus on MTSP’s recent contributions to both classical vehicles/robots and unmanned aerial vehicles. We highlight the approaches applied to solve the MTSP as well as its application domains. We analyze the MTSP variants and propose a taxonomy and a classification of recent studies.