This paper presents an application of topological data analysis (TDA) to discrete optimization problems. This application can improve the performance of the 2-opt local search method for the traveling salesman problem by simply applying standard Vietoris-Rips construction to a data set of trials.
In recent years, topological data analysis (TDA) has been successfully applied to many different scientific domains, such as aviation, path planning, and time series analysis. To the best of the author's knowledge, this project will be the first to apply TDA to the logistics domain.
