Birth of a salesman

Abstract

The AIAA Artificial Intelligence Design Challenge is eccentric and intriguing, combining features from traveling salesman and stochastic optimization problems together with several side constraints thrown in for additional appeal. The challenge is to devise a solution algorithm that will reliably find optimal (or near optimal) solutions and can be extended to more general problems. We present our algorithm for this challenge in this paper. The fundamental algorithm for finding near-optimal solutions is disarmingly simple and can be made quite efficient through the introduction of several bounds on the problem. The reader will quickly discover that these bounds do not require a deep understanding of traveling salesman algorithms and should enjoy devising additional bounds to add to the potpourri.