• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• v.18 no.12
• /
• pp.75-82
• /
• 2013

This paper proposes a $O(n^2)$ polynomial time algorithm to obtain optimal solution for Traveling Salesman problem that is a NP-complete because polynomial time algorithm has been not known yet. The biggest problem in a large-scale Traveling Salesman problem is the fact that the amount of data to be processed is $n{\times}n$, and thus as n increases, the data increases by multifold. Therefore, this paper proposes a methodology by which the data amount is first reduced to approximately n/2. Then, it seeks a bi-directional route at a random point. The proposed algorithm has proved to be successful in obtaining the optimal solutions with $O(n^2)$ time complexity when applied to TSP-1 with 26 European cities and TSP-2 with 46 cities of the USA. It could therefore be applied as a generalized algorithm for TSP.