A Review on Algorithms Used to Solve Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem

The multiple Travelling Salesman Problem (mTSP) is the general form of TSP, in which one or more than one salesmen can be used in the solution set. The Constraint in the optimization task is that each salesman returns to starting point at end of trip, travelling to a specific set of cities in between and except for the first one, each and every city is visited by exactly one salesman. The idea is to search for the shortest route that is the least distance needed for each salesman to travel from the starting location to individual cities and back to the location from where he has started. It is a complex NP-Hard problem and has various applications mostly in the field of scheduling and routing. The amount of computation time to solve this problem grows exponentially as number of cities increases so, the meta-heuristic optimization algorithms, such as genetic algorithms (GAs) are needed to be explored. The goal of this paper is to find out various algorithms used in literature to solve mTSP.