Variants of travelling salesman problem: A survey

The Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a well-known NP-hard problem exceedingly studied in the fields of operations research and computer science. In TSP, a salesman wants to visit each of a set of cities exactly once and return to the starting city with minimal distance travelled. The significance of the TSP is that it can be pertained on many practical applications in real life scenario. But, it is not always possible to apply TSP for all the real world applications because of different constraints and also variations of TSP might be desired in such real-life scenarios. Therefore, several variants of TSP have been proposed to manage with the application specific constraints. In this work, a comprehensive study on various categories of TSP variants such as Profit Based, Time Windows based, Maximal Based and Kinetic Based has been studied with respect to the problem formulation and applications.