A novel method for solving the multiple traveling salesmen problem with multiple depots

Multi-traveling salesman problem (MTSP) is an extension of traveling salesman problem, which is a famous NP hard problem, and can be used to solve many real world problems, such as railway transportation, routing and pipeline laying. In this paper, we analyze the general properties of MTSP, and find that the multiple depots and closed paths in the graph is a big issue for MTSP. Thus, a novel method is presented to solve it. We transform a complicated graph into a simplified one firstly, then an effective algorithm is proposed to solve the MTSP based on the simplified results. In addition, we also propose a method to optimize the general results by using 2-OPT. Simulation results show that our method can find the global solution for MTSP efficiently.