Travelling Salesman

Travelling Salesman is a software solution that tries to solve the problem of the travelling salesman (to find the shortest way between several cities he has to visit) by applying a circular Kohonen map.

Advantages to portable apps

The installation process is not a prerequisite, as this product is portable. As a consequence, the Windows registry is not going to suffer any kind of changes, without your approval.
Moreover, you can easily copy the program files to a portable storage unit (e.g. USB thumb drive), so that you can easily use Travelling Salesman on any computer you come across, by clicking the EXE.

Straightforward environment

This simple interface enables you to view the number of cities that are to be processed, as well as the calculated route in a dedicated panel, while it also contains several buttons and boxes which enable you to customize the available options. You can easily learn how to handle this application, even if you do not have a lot of experience with the IT world.

Input information and view results

In order to be able to calculate what routes to take, you are required to input a lot of information, such as the number of cities, epochs, neurons, number of neighbors and the speed. Once all of this is done, all you have to do is click the “Start” button, and wait for the program to do all the rest.
This process does not take very long, yet you should know that this also depends on your computer’s performance and the complexity of the calculation.

A final evaluation

Overall, Travelling Salesman is a pretty simple, yet handy piece of software when it comes to helping travelling salesmen calculate the most efficient route for their future endeavors. It does not hamper the computer’s performance, the response time is good and we did not come across any bugs or errors. However, the interface is not particularly appealing, and we would have liked to be able to save the results to the hard drive in a file, for safekeeping.