Many important and valuable planning and scheduling problems in logistics and automation are combinatorial optimization problems. The most famous problem of this type is the traveling salesman problem ...

Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research shows how to implement simulated annealing for the Traveling Salesman Problem (find the best ordering of a set of discrete items). The goal of a combinatorial ...

In Mo Willems’ children’s book Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, the main character—a pigeon, obvs—uses every trick in the book (literally) to convince the reader that it should be allowed to drive ...

A salesman has to visit every major city in the U.S. What is the cheapest way to hit them all exactly once and then return to the headquarters? The computation of the single best answer for what is ...