A Comprehensive Survey on the Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem: Applications, Approaches and Taxonomy

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews recent research on the Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem (MTSP), covering applications, solution approaches, and a taxonomy, highlighting its significance in various real-world domains.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive taxonomy and classification of recent MTSP studies, focusing on classical and UAV applications.

Findings

Various solution approaches are applied to MTSP.

MTSP is widely used in robotics, transportation, and networking.

The survey identifies key variants and application domains.

Abstract

The Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem (MTSP) is among the most interesting combinatorial optimization problems because it is widely adopted in real-life applications, including robotics, transportation, networking, etc. Although the importance of this optimization problem, there is no survey dedicated to reviewing recent MTSP contributions. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive review of existing studies on MTSP. In this survey, we focus on MTSP's recent contributions to both classical vehicles/robots and unmanned aerial vehicles. We highlight the approaches applied to solve the MTSP as well as its application domains. We analyze the MTSP variants and propose a taxonomy and a classification of recent studies.