The link below will direct you to a secure part of my web site where you find the Tours program and several examples. I have created the Tours program to allow the experimental investigation of the efficiency and effectiveness of various heuristic and optimal algorithms for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). I use it to demonstrate heuristics and the Traveling Salesman Problem in my senior undergraduate and Masters classes.
You can display an illustration of the Tours32 program. You can also display two training movies for the use of the Tours32 program in AVI format. The first movie illustrates the creation of a project, the second movie illustrates the use of several interactive algorithms. You can also download the movies in a compressed ZIP archive. You can display an illustration of the Tours (version 4.xx) program.
The interactive help for the Tours 4.xx program contains a section on how to import data from previous versions of the program. At this time this is the only description available of the file format and fields to create projects for the Tours32 program, which is an earlier version of the Tours 4.xx program. You can download a compressed ZIP archive of the Tours 4.xx interactive help. Finally, you can download the Tours 4.xx User's Manual in Adobe Acrobat 4.0 PDF format.
You can download and use the Tours program as long as you are a student enrolled at Georgia Tech. Upon graduation you must delete all copies of the Tours program that you have installed and destroy all backup copies you may have made. You may not give the Tours program to anybody else or install the program on a computer where other people may have access to it. Students at Georgia Tech can download the program directly from the secure site below.
Several versions of the program exist. Tours32 is compatible with Windows 3.1 with Win32s installed and newer versions of Windows such Windows 95 and Windows 98. Tours version 4.xx is only compatible with Windows 95 and Windows 98. Both versions are compatible with Windows NT version 3.51 and newer. The link below points to the older version of the program since the new version is still to buggy to be distributed. Please send me email if you are currently a student enrolled at Georgia Tech and would like to beta test the new version of the Tours program.
Place the Tours program an all its associate libraries and system libraries in the same directory. I strongly suggest a separate directory. The case files have *.dat and *.pts extensions and can be placed in a different directory, but the .dat and .pts file of a case should be placed in the same directory. Tours does not change the registry or creates any .ini files, so uninstalling Tours is a simple as deleting the directory in which Tours was placed.
