Instructions - Traveling Salesman Problem

This model is designed to be run on a UNIX environment ( X-Windows required for visualization) from the command line. Additionally, in order to benefit from running the code in parallel, you must have MPI installed on your UNIX cluster or multi-processor machine. The command to run the program is 'travel n_cities n_neighbors i_outer i_inner temp cooling do_display do_print'. All arguments are optional, but if you intent to use an argument you must provide values for all arguments before it. For example, if you wanted to specify the number of iterations in the inner and outer loops, you would also have to specify values for the number of cities and number of neighboring clusters of cities, but would not have to specify a value of the initial temperature.

Default values for the command line arguments are as follows

• n_cities = 500 (number of cities)
• n_neighbors = 1 (allowable values are 1, 2, and 4 for clusters of cities and -1 for a regular polygon)
• i_outer=100000 (number of blocks of trials)
• i_inner =10 (size of 1 block of trials, processes compare results once per block)
• temp = 1 (initial temperature)
• cooling = 0.999 (cooling factor)
• do_display = 1 (X display on = 1, X display off = 1)
• do_print = 0 (printed display on = 1, printed display off = 0)