Concorde TSP Solver

Concorde
Original author(s)David Applegate, Robert Bixby, Václav Chvátal, William J. Cook
Initial releaseAugust 27, 1997; 27 years ago (1997-08-27)
Stable release
03.12.19 / December 19, 2003; 20 years ago (2003-12-19)
Repositorywww.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/concorde/downloads/downloads.htm
Written inC
Operating systemLinux, Oracle Solaris, Microsoft Windows (with Cygwin)
Size1.3 MB
Available inEnglish
TypeMathematical optimization software
LicenseSource-available, free for academic research
Websitewww.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/concorde.html

The Concorde TSP Solver is a program for solving the travelling salesman problem. It was written by David Applegate, Robert E. Bixby, Vašek Chvátal, and William J. Cook, in ANSI C, and is freely available for academic use.

Concorde has been applied to problems of gene mapping,[1] protein function prediction,[2] vehicle routing,[3] conversion of bitmap images to continuous line drawings,[4] scheduling ship movements for seismic surveys,[5] and in studying the scaling properties of combinatorial optimization problems.[6]

According to Mulder & Wunsch (2003), Concorde “is widely regarded as the fastest TSP solver, for large instances, currently in existence.” In 2001, Concorde won a 5000 guilder prize from CMG for solving a vehicle routing problem the company had posed in 1996.[7]

Concorde requires a linear programming solver and only supports QSopt[8] and CPLEX 8.0.

  1. ^ Hitte et al. (2003).
  2. ^ Johnson & Liu (2006).
  3. ^ Applegate et al. (2002).
  4. ^ Bosch & Herman (2004).
  5. ^ Gutin et al. (2005)
  6. ^ Aldous & Percus (2003).
  7. ^ Whizzkids '96 vehicle routing, from the Concorde web site, retrieved August 26, 2008.
  8. ^ "QSopt Linear Programming Solver". University of Waterloo. Retrieved 28 October 2023.