A Survey of Approximability Results for Traveling Salesman Problems using the TSP-T3CO Definition Scheme

The traveling salesman (or salesperson) problem, short TSP, is a problem of strong interest to many researchers from mathematics, economics, and computer science. Manifold TSP variants occur in nearly every scientific field and application domain: engineering, physics, biology, life sciences, and manufacturing just to name a few. Several thousand papers are published on theoretical research or application-oriented results each year. This paper provides the first systematic survey on the best currently known approximability and inapproximability results for well-known TSP variants such as the "standard" TSP, Path TSP, Bottleneck TSP, Maximum Scatter TSP, Generalized TSP, Clustered TSP, Traveling Purchaser Problem, Profitable Tour Problem, Quota TSP, Prize-Collecting TSP, Orienteering Problem, Time-dependent TSP, TSP with Time Windows, and the Orienteering Problem with Time Windows. The foundation of our survey is the definition scheme T3CO, which we propose as a uniform, easy-to-use and extensible means for the formal and precise definition of TSP variants. Applying T3CO to formally define the variant studied by a paper reveals subtle differences within the same named variant and also brings out the differences between the variants more clearly. We achieve the first comprehensive, concise, and compact representation of approximability results by using T3CO definitions. This makes it easier to understand the approximability landscape and the assumptions under which certain results hold. Open gaps become more evident and results can be compared more easily.