The primary purpose of this paper is to introduce and mathematically formulate the covering salesman problem (CSP). The CSP may be stated as follows: identify the minimum cost tour of a subset of n given cities such that every city not on the tour is within some predetermined covering distance standard, S , of a city that is on the tour. The CSP may be viewed as a generalization of the traveling salesman problem. A heuristic procedure for solving the CSP is presented and demonstrated with a sample problem.
['John R. Current', 'David Schilling']
THE COVERING SALESMAN PROBLEM