The traveling salesman problem

The traveling salesman problem is perhaps the most important problem in the development of combinatorial optimization. It is closely related to essentially all paradigms of the field: flows, matchings, matroids. It has driven advances in exact approaches, in particular those based on polyhedral combinatorics, and led to the advent of Concorde. Its approximation properties have been puzzling researchers for a long time, since Christofides' algorithm. The goal of the workshop is to celebrate this illustrious problem and its relatives, both in the context of exact algorithms and approximation algorithms.

Distinguished speakers

• David B. Shmoys, ORIE and Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, USA
• Jens Vygen, Forschungsinstitut für Diskrete Mathematik, Universität Bonn, Germany

Organizing committee

• Samuel Fiorini, Département de Mathématiques, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
• Gianpaolo Oriolo, Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Impresa, Universitè di Tor Vergata, Roma, Italy
• Gautier Stauffer, Département de Mathématiques de l'Université de Bordeaux 1, France
• Paolo Ventura, Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi ed Informatica "Antonio Ruberti", Roma, Italy