The Traveling Salesman Problem is one of the most intensively studied problems in computational mathematics. These pages are devoted to the history, applications, and current research of this challenge of finding the shortest route visiting each member of a collection of locations and returning to your starting point.

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New!  iPhone App		Concorde TSP Solver for iPhone/iPad.
New!  Iowa Tour		Optimal route for a 99-county campaign tour.
Mona Lisa TSP		$1,000 Prize for a 100,000-city challenge problem.
Google Maps		Plot an optimal TSP tour with a Google interface.
pla85900		Solution of a 85,900-city TSP.
Ron Schreck's Flight		All 109 public airports in North Carolina.

The Traveling Salesman Problem: A Computational Study by Applegate, Bixby, Chvatal, and Cook.		Description of the techniques we use to compute lower bounds on the lengths of all TSP tours.
Optimal solution for visiting all 24,978 cities in Sweden. Tour has length approximately 72,500 kilometers.		The TSP was featured in a contest run by Proctor and Gamble in 1962. The challenge problem had 33 cities.
A graphical user interface available for Concorde on Windows' platforms.		The Concorde TSP solver is used in a genome sequencing package from the National Institutes of Health.
A collection of 25 TSP challenge problems consisting of cities in Argentina through Zimbabwe.		Pages describing some of the history of the TSP as a mathematical and computational challenge.
A flash game to find the optimal tour through a randomly generated set of city locations.		A challenge problem consisting of the locations of 1,904,711 cities throughout the world.

The work described here is supported by Office of Naval Research (N00014-09-1-0048) and National Science Foundation (CMMI-0726370) grants, and by the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Graduate students are directed to Operations Research at Georgia Tech. A good source for computational work on the traveling salesman problem and general optimization is the journal Mathematical Programming Computation.

Contact: William Cook (bico@isye.gatech.edu)