4OR (2007) 5:315–317 DOI 10.1007/s10288-007-0058-0 RESEARCH PAPER The traveling salesman problem: a book review Adam N. Letchford · Andrea Lodi Received: 15 September 2007 / Revised: 25 September 2007 / Published online: 17 October 2007 © Springer-Verlag 2007 Abstract We review the recent book authored by David L. Applegate, Robert E. Bixby, Vasˇ ek Chvátal and William J. Cook, The traveling salesman problem: a com- putational study, Princeton Series in Applied Mathematics. Princeton University Press 2007, Hardback price $45.00 / £26.95, 606pp, ISBN 978-0-691-12993-8. Keywords TSP · Branch-and-cut · Separation · Computer implementation MSC classification (2000) 90C05 · 90C27 · 90C35 · 90C57 The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is the problem of finding a tour through a specified set of cities that minimizes the total travel distance; or, more formally, the problem of finding a Hamiltonian circuit of minimum cost in an edge-weighted graph. It is probably the most well-known NP -hard combinatorial optimization problem, and arises in many practical applications, either directly or as a sub-problem. Despite the fact that three excellent books devoted to the TSP have been published in the past (Lawler et al. 1985; Reinelt 1994; Gutin and Punnen 2002), this new work by Applegate, Bixby, Chvátal and Cook has been eagerly awaited by researchers in the field. (As a personal memory, a young second reviewer had the chance of having a preliminary version of separation chapters 8, 9 and 11 as lecture notes in a Ph.D. course taught by Vasˇ ek Chvátal: Zinal (Switzerland), March 2–6, 1999!) A. N. Letchford Department of Management Science, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YW, England e-mail: A.N.Letchford@lancaster.ac.uk A. Lodi (B ) DEIS, Università di Bologna, Viale Risorgimento 2, 40136 Bologna, Italy e-mail: andrea.lodi@unibo.it 123