[GRASS-user] traveling salesman problem in air

[Martina Schäfer]

Dear GRASS experts!
I encountered an interesting problem and am curious about solutions.
A helicopter company has got a file from a client regarding a forest 
inventory. The file contains 1430 polygons representing areas to be 
visited. Now we want to calculate the optimal route to visit all 
polygons. In contrast to a traveling salesman , we don't have a network 
of routes as the helicopter can fly everywhere. Would it be a solution 
to have the distance betweeen areas as the "cost"?
I used a tool in MapInfo that connects successive closest points which 
worked very nice but not optimal.
Anyone knows of other solutions?

Regards,
Martina

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