A new application of the traveling salesman problem: The Turkish cashier problem

Abstract

We define the problem of finding a route for the cashier that minimizes the cost of transportation as the Turkish Cashier Problem (TCP). It is a special case of the well-known traveling salesman problem. To solve the TCP, we developed a heuristic algorithm, constructed a tight lower bound, and show that the heuristic algorithm performs very successfully for practical instances of the problem.