Asymptotic Optimality of the Greedy Patching Heuristic for Max TSP in Doubling Metrics

Abstract: The maximum traveling salesman problem (Max~TSP) consists of finding a Hamiltonian cycle with the maximum total weight of the edges in a given complete weighted graph. We prove that, in the case when the edge weights are induced by a metric space of bounded doubling dimension, asymptotically optimal solutions of the problem can be found by the simple greedy patching heuristic. Taking as a start point a maximum-weight cycle cover, this heuristic iteratively patches pairs of its cycles into one minimizing the weight loss at each step.