The traveling-salesman problem and minimum spanning trees: Part II

The relationship between the symmetric traveling-salesman problem and the minimum spanning tree problem yields a sharp lower bound on the cost of an optimum tour. An efficient iterative method for approximating this bound closely from below is presented. A branch-and-bound procedure based upon these considerations has easily produced proven optimum solutions to all traveling-salesman problems presented to it, ranging in size up to sixty-four cities. The bounds used are so sharp that the search trees are minuscule compared to those normally encountered in combinatorial problems of this type.