In the travelling salesman problem (TSP), one salesman has to travel to N cities using the shortest possible route. My problem has several salesmen: how to assign cities to them to minimize the total travel distance?Does such a problem have a canonical name and established algorithms/heuristics? (Given that it is probably necessary to calculate the shortest route for each salesman given the cities assigned to him, it seems to require a loop over TSP problems, so its NP-nastiness status cannot look pretty.)
Travelling salesmen problem: assigning cities to several salesmen
optimization;algorithms