That Travelling Salesman/Sat-Nav style problem....

Hi all,

I was just wondering how easy is it to essentially put together a traveling salesman style problem (e.g. 10 towns to visit, what's the optimum route etc.) in Excel. My initial thought of how I came to this was from working in London I've been aware of the tube challenge (visit or go through 270 stations in one day - there is a world record attached, and I believe there is a US equivalent). I have model sports tournaments in Excel (using data tables) so I figured it would be possible to model this. 10 minutes in google and I came up with this:

http://www.thetubechallenge.com/proj...ng/network-map

Who clearly has modeled it in Excel and is a former world record holder (someone took less than a minute off of his time which at over 16 hours has to be harsh).

I just wondered how easy/difficult is it to do this kind of thing (I'd just be keen to set up say a 20 node network for the learning experience). Has anyone seen any worked examples or books on this kind of thing?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Lots of resources at http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/

Thanks for the link. I didn't actually think to search for traveling salesman (which would obviously have a lot more hits than tube challenge). Disappointingly a lot of the videos on Youtube seem to be distribution problems and not the TSP. Just looking to get a foot in the door though, so am just looking for pointers initially.

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edit:

did some searches on here and found some nice queries along these lines from a while ago including the tennis ball problem and the link in that thread to an Excel blog with a nice download.

See http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-q...ml#post3173665