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An analysis of the extended Christofides heuristic for the $$k$$-depot TSP. (English) Zbl 1219.90149
Summary: We study an extension of the classical traveling salesman problem (TSP) to a situation with $$k\geq 2$$ depots at each of which a distinct salesman is based. We show that a non-trivial extension of the well-known Christofides heuristic has a tight approximation ratio of $$2 - 1/k$$, which improves on the known 2-approximation algorithm from the literature.

##### MSC:
 90C27 Combinatorial optimization 90C35 Programming involving graphs or networks
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##### References:
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