The job-shop scheduling problem is a notoriously difficult problem in combinatorial optimization. Although even modest sized instances remain computationally intractable, a number of important algorithmic advances have been made in recent years by J. Adams, E. Balas and D. Zawack; J. Carlier and E. Pinson; B. J. Lageweg, J. K. Lenstra and A. H. G. Rinnooy Kan; and others. Making use of a number of these advances, we have designed and implemented a new heuristic procedure for finding schedules, a cutting-plane method for obtaining lower bounds, and a combinatorial branch and bound algorithm. Our optimization procedure, combining the heuristic method and the combinatorial branch and bound algorithm, solved the well-known 10×10 problem of J. F. Muth and G. L. Thomson in under 7 minutes of computation time on a Sun Sparcstation 1. INFORMS Journal on Computing, ISSN 1091-9856, was published as ORSA Journal on Computing from 1989 to 1995 under ISSN 0899-1499.

We discuss several issues that arise in the implementation of Martin, Otto, and Felten's Chained Lin-Kernighan heuristic for large-scale traveling salesman problems. Computational results are presented for TSPLIB instances ranging in size from 11,849 cities up to 85,900 cities; for each of these instances, solutions within 1% of the optimal value can be found in under 1 CPU minute on a 300 Mhz Pentium II workstation, and solutions within 0.5% of optimal can be found in under 10 CPU minutes. We also demonstrate the scalability of the heuristic, presenting results for randomly generated Euclidean instances having up to 25,000,000 cities. For the largest of these random instances, a tour within 1% of an estimate of the optimal value can be obtained in under 1 CPU day on a 64-bit IBM RS6000 workstation.

No abstract

Abstract. The first computer implementation of the Dantzig-FulkersonJohnson cutting-plane method for solving the traveling salesman problem, written by Martin, used subtour inequalities as well as cutting planes of Gomory's type. The practice of looking for and using cuts that match prescribed templates in conjunction with Gomory cuts was continued in computer codes of Miliotis, Land, and Fleischmann. Grötschel, Padberg, and Hong advocated a different policy, where the template paradigm is the only source of cuts; furthermore, they argued for drawing the templates exclusively from the set of linear inequalities that induce facets of the TSP polytope. These policies were adopted in the work of Crowder and Padberg, in the work of Grötschel and Holland, and in the work of Padberg and Rinaldi; their computer codes produced the most impressive computational TSP successes of the nineteen eighties. Eventually, the template paradigm became the standard frame of reference for cutting planes in the TSP. The purpose of this paper is to describe a technique for finding cuts that disdains all understanding of the TSP polytope and bashes on regardless of all prescribed templates. Combining this technique with the traditional template approach was a crucial step in our solutions of a 13,509-city TSP instance and a 15,112-city TSP instance.

No abstract