Speaker: Andreas Klose, Department of Mathematics, AU

Title: Embedding the Concorde TSP solver in Python

Abstract

Sometimes, when solving certain types of routing problems, we are in need of a solver that can be called as a subroutine to repeatedly solve a TSP. The best available (exact) TSP solver is Concorde developed by Applegate, Bixby, Chvatal and Cook and maintained by William Cook, University of Waterloo. The C-code is free to use for research purposes, but not readily compiled to a callable library. In this seminar, I show (i) how to compile this code to a callable library (dll, shared object), (ii) how to use the Python package "ctypes" to access callable library functions in general and, (iii) how to do that so that Concorde can be directly called from Python.

Coordinators: Marcel Turkensteen and Sanne Wøhlk