A man-machine approach toward solving the traveling salesman problem

The traveling salesman problem belongs to an important class of scheduling and routing problems. It is also a subproblem in solving others, such as the warehouse distribution problem. It has been attacked by many mathematical methods with but meager success. Only for special forms of the problem or for problems with a moderate number of points can it be solved exactly, even if very large amounts of computer time are used. Heuristic procedures have been proposed and tested with only slightly better results. This paper describes a computer aided heuristic technique which uses only a modest amount of computer time in real-time to solve large (100-200) point problems. This technique takes advantage of both the computer's and the human's problem-solving abilities. The computer is not asked to solve the problem in a brute force way as in many of today's heuristics, but it is asked to organize the data for the human so that the human can solve the problem easily.