This article talks about a free interactive traveling salesman problem solver that visualizes the best route for multiple locations. The Traveling Salesman Problem (often called TSP) is an algorithmic problem focused on optimization. The problem is to find the best optimal solution. In context of a salesman, it’s about finding the shorter and faster way to cover multiple locations.
TSPVIS is a free TSP Visualizer that helps you find the best optimal path to multiple locations. You either select locations on the map or choose the number o of locations to pick randomly. Then, you can visualize the best path covering all those locations based on Exhaustive and Heuristic algorithms. This tool runs a route animation covering each location one by one. You can pause it anywhere, add delay, and get the best path along with total distance and elevation.
Also read: Route Planning Websites to Find Best Route for Multiple Addresses
Interactive Traveling Salesman Problem Solver
TSPVIS is a web-based service that you can easily access in a modern web browser. It does not require an account, you can just open it, add your locations, and visualize the best path.
Pick Locations
To find the best path with this service, you have to mark the location points on the map. There are three ways to do that. You can use any of the following options from the Points section:
- Random-option: This option automatically picks the selected number of points on the map randomly.
- Save-option: This option lets you manually pick each location point on the map.
- Map-option: This option loads pre-defined location points for testing.
Visualize Best Path
After picking the location, you can visualize the best optimal path along with intermediate paths based on the following algorithms:
Exhaustive
- Branch and Bound on Cost
- Depth First Search (Brute Force)
- Random
Heuristic
- Shortest Path
- Two Opt Inversion
- Two Opt Reciprocal Exchange
From the Controls section, you can start the visualization animation that connects each point one by one as per the selected algorithm. The visualization also shows path distance and elevation along with the running time of the algorithm.
Visualize the best traveling route for multiple locations here.
Wrap Up
TSPVIS is a nice website to quickly visualize the traveling salesman problem for various algorithms. It plots straight lines connecting the points with no option to save the routed map which makes it okay for testing algorithms but no so ideal for salesmen or travelers. But, it can still be handy for anyone to order the locations for an optimal path.
