How can the Travelling Salesman Problem be solved using Solver Ad.

[Guest]

 

[Fredrik Wahlgren]

For how many cities do you want to solve this problem? It won't take long
before you have billions of possible solutions. I seriously doubt the solver
is useful for this kind of tsak. The last time I had to deal with this
problem, I used a Genetic Algorithm written in C++.

If you still want to use Excel, you have to use an add-in written in C++ or
some .NET language. That is, Excel is only used as a kind of GUI.

/Fredrik

 

[Guest]

For toy problems you do it iteratively and check all possible solutions.

It is impossible to solve exhaustively for significant problems however.
For those you'll have to go read some math books for the optimum ways
to approximate a reasonable solution. Airlines and such spend huge
amounts of money trying to optimize their route systems with massive
computer systems and PhD mathematicians. It's not really a trivial
Excel problem for your PC.

Bill

 

[Tushar Mehta]

You'll be surprised at how much is possible with Solver. Search google
for more:

http://www.google.com/search?q=excel+"traveling+salesman

While true that the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is NP-hard, most
learning exercises are of a size that XL+Solver *should* be able to
tackle.

--
Regards,

Tushar Mehta
www.tushar-mehta.com
Excel, PowerPoint, and VBA add-ins, tutorials
Custom MS Office productivity solutions