Building a Traveling Salesman Problem Set
Brian T. Luke (btluke@aol.com)
LearningFromTheWeb.net

The first step is to download the file bldcity.zip and save it to a directory where you can use the program and related methods of solution. (If given the option, make sure that you use a binary download.)

When the entries of this zip-file are extracted, two new files will be stored on your disk.

  1. bldcity.dat which contains the data needed to run the program.
  2. bldcity.exe which is the executable that creates the problem set.

An inspection of bldcity.dat shows that it contains the following three lines. 


 60
 1000. 1000.
 42086713.
The first contains the number of cities that will be created, and this number cannot exceed 100. The second line gives the x- and y-dimensions of the map on which these cities will be placed, and the third line contains the seed to the random number generator. If you want to create the same data set that is used to generate the results I present on my web pages, do not change any of the entries in this file. You can modify this file at a later time if you want to generate new TSP sets.

When bldcity.exe is run from a DOS-window, it creates a file named cities.dat. This file contains the number of cities in the problem set, the x- and y-dimensions of the map, and then the map coordinates for each city. This cities.dat file is used by the optimization methods to generate routes.
Return to Description of the Traveling Salesman Problem.