Improved Approximations for Cubic and Cubic Bipartite TSP

Abstract: We show improved approximation guarantees for the traveling salesman problem on cubic graphs, and cubic bipartite graphs. For cubic bipartite graphs with n nodes, we improve on recent results of Karp and Ravi (2014) by giving a simple "local improvement" algorithm that finds a tour of length at most 5/4 n - 2. For 2-connected cubic graphs, we show that the techniques of Moemke and Svensson (2011) can be combined with the techniques of Correa, Larre and Soto (2012), to obtain a tour of length at most (4/3-1/8754)n.