An exact solution method for the MTSP

A new mathematical model for the multi-travelling salesman problem (MTSP) is presented. The MTSP formulation is modified, and a branch-and-bound algorithm for solving this problem exactly is developed. The significance of this procedure is that it does not need to transform the problem into a single travelling salesman problem, which has been the case in the dominant algorithms for solving the above problem. Moreover, computational experience has shown that for a fixed number of cities to be visited, the time required to solve the problem decreases markedly as the number of salesmen increases.