pgRouting TSP: is it possible to apply to the roads network?

Question

I want to solve a TSP problem on a set of points from a road network (given N points, find the shortest possible route to visit them all). It seems that pgrouting pgr_tsp function doesn't take into account roads existence - it simply estimates Euclidian distance between the points, so it's like walking by a straight line.

Is there a way to achive what I want with pgrouting? I saw something like tsp_dijkstra function in the old release, but, it's now removed and I cannot find a documentation for it.

Or maybe there're other tools (not pgrouting)?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The upcoming release of pgRouting has two TSP functions: one as you describe, using Euclidean distance between points. But the other one takes a distance matrix as an argument, so you can decide yourself if you want (or can) calculate real distances to solve TSP.

See: http://docs.pgrouting.org/dev/src/tsp/doc/index.html

There have been various discussions on the pgRouting mailing list whether the current distance matrix is "user-friendly" or not. So if you try it, feedback is very much appreciated.