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jakobbossek / salesperson

Algorithms to solve and features to characterise TSP problems.
http://jakobbossek.github.io/salesperson/
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Transfer R interface to state-of-the-art solvers #12

Closed jakobbossek closed 9 years ago

jakobbossek commented 9 years ago

A basic implementation already exists in our TSP repository. Integrate it and find an easy way for the user to set the path(s) to the binaries of the solvers.

jakobbossek commented 9 years ago

We need to tackle some problems in this context.

  1. Since LKH/EAX and the corresponding restart versions are dedicated binary files, they must not be shipped with the package according to the CRAN guidelines. We hence should provide a download location for all of these solvers.
  2. There must be an exported function to set the path(s) to the above-mentioned solvers (see the concorde_path function of the TSP package as an example). Since this seems to be very restrictive and redundant the runSolver function should also look in the current working directory and in the R options for the solvers.
larskotthoff commented 9 years ago

All of these solvers are open source, we could ship the source and compile them when the package is installed (this is not violating CRAN guidelines).

jakobbossek commented 9 years ago

We could simply include the code, compile it and use its current interface which requires the tsp instance to be stored in a file. But this interface is ugly. It would be nice to pass a Network instance (instead of a file path) to the solver and solve it directly, but this would require a lot of code adaptions of LKH / EAX.

kerschke commented 9 years ago

How about "storing" the network temporarily in a file and then access it via the solver?! Would not be the best solution, but maybe a work-around without adapting the solvers itself.

jakobbossek commented 9 years ago

Yeah, this is a very ugly workaround. In the worst case this would require two imports of the same instance. I don't like it, but this is the way it is solved now :sweat_smile:

jakobbossek commented 9 years ago

Going to finish this within the next two weeks.

jakobbossek commented 9 years ago

Closing this. Solver interface is implemented. It needs some more features, which are covered by other issues. We can now pass either a network or a path to an instance in tsplib format.

next-josealbertoarcos commented 5 years ago

Hi there! I've just discovered this package and it looks great. But, where can I find the binaries of EAX-restart?