Operational estimators for the length of a traveling salesman tour

The paper defines several estimators that can be used to obtain approximations for the length of a traveling salesman tour based on the actual locations of customers and the depot. It performs extensive Monte Carlo experiments to determine the ‘best’ multiplier values that should be used with the estimators, and computes average approximation errors of the estimators. Sensitivity analysis that examines the robustness of the estimators with different shapes of the service region is also conducted. The results show that very accurate and robust tour length approximations can be obtained using one of the proposed estimators.