Searching for backbones — an efficient parallel algorithm for the traveling salesman problem Original Research Article

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) plays an important role in Operations Research, Applied Mathematics and Computational Physics. We investigated it using a stochastic approach. Studying several solutions of a special TSP we found that many parts of a good solution are the same in all other good solutions for this problem. In this paper we discuss an efficient parallel method to reduce the TSP to a smaller one by finding these backbones and eliminating them to get even better solutions in a very short time and a few observables of interest corresponding to this parallel approach.