The Prize Collecting Traveling Salesman Problem and its Applications

Few combinatorial optimization problems have such widespread applicability as the traveling salesman problem (TSP). Practically any situation involving decisions that affect the sequence in which various actions, tasks or operations are to be executed, has a TSP aspect to it. Often such problems can be formulated as special TSP instances, but even more frequently the problem at hand turns out to be some “relative” of the TSP, or, mathematically speaking, some generalization of the TSP.