The Travelling Salesman problem involves a salesman who has to visit a number of cities in a single closed tour. The salesman always starts and ends the tour in his home city and visits each other city on the tour exactly once. The problem is to minimise the overall amount of distance travelled. This problem arises in many other situations familiar to engineers. For instance, the design of electrical wiring in a building or in a car, the optimisation of the movement of a read-write head on a disk drive, the planning of airliners movements, the design of bus routes or garbage collection truck routes.
You are required to design and implement a GUI that demonstrates a possible solution to the problem. The optimisation procedure is described in this assignment sheet.
Write a MATLAB GUI driven program to demonstrate the solution to the TSP. The program must show a graphical display of the 2-dimensional map, with the cities suitably displayed on the map. You can observe an example of this by running the MATLAB demo program travel. Run this demo and you will see one possible approach. We will use a different approach and you may use your imaginations in designing your solution. It need not necessarily be similar to the demo.
- Only one command per line is allowed
- Document your functions clearly with comments
- Use meaningful variable and function names
- Structure your program so that functions perform small and well-defined tasks.
- The user should be able to try and optimise the same set of cities multiple times. The program must therefore seed the random number generator from the system clock each time it is run. Use MATLAB help function to find out more about random numbers and seeding the random number generator.