History of TSP Computation

The triumph of Dantzig, Fulkerson, and Johnson in 1954 set off a flurry of activity in mathematics and operations research circles, building toward Gomory’s fundamental work in mixed-integer linear programming at the end of the decade. Interestingly, however, the TSP literature from the 1950s does not include any attempts to extend or automate the Dantzig et al. solution procedure; from the narrow perspective of the TSP, this appears to be the dark ages of the cutting-plane method. This inactivity slowed the overall progress on the problem, and it would be another 16 years before a larger TSP instance was solved,