Traveling salesman problem
A natural extension of shortest paths is the shortest possible route that stops at each location. For instance, consider a produce truck that needs to stock all five of our stores. The shortest route that will stop at each of our five stores saves time and fuel for the driver and allows produce to arrive at each store in the shortest time frame.
The traveling salesman problem seeks to find the shortest route that stops at each location or the shortest route that stops at an arbitrary number of possible locations. In graph theory, this problem (and Euler’s problem) is related to cycles of a graph, which define a non-empty path that starts and ends at the same vertex.
In practice, algorithms are needed to find the shortest path, and for large problems, computational time and convergence to a solution can restrict the usage of most algorithms. NetworkX provides the Christofides algorithm as a solver, which finds the shortest spanning tree (network...
