Some Remarks on the Efficiency of Complexity Indices for the Traveling Salesman Problem

Abstract

We consider the symmetric traveling salesman problem (TSP) with instances represented by complete graphs G with distances between cities as edge weights. A complexity index is an invariant of an instance I by which we predict the execution time of an exact TSP algorithm for I . In previous papers we have considered some short edge subgraphs of G and defined several new invariants related to their connected components. Extensive computational experiments with instances on 50 vertices with the uniform distribution of integer edge weights in the interval [1,100] show that there exists correlation between the sequences of selected invariants and the sequence of execution times of the well-known TSP Solver Concorde. In this paper we give some remarks on the efficiency of these complexity indices and indicate how they can be practically used.