The first question to ask is why do you need a traveling salesman to begin with. With the advent of the internet and new digital medias much information can flow from these channels but the personal touch comes into play when more proof statements need to be countered at the point of sale when they are face to face with a customer. Anticipation of your products acceptance be it cost or performance or even adaptability with a customer comes from the interaction of the customer and the sales force. The sales force should be the forward edge for the product manager where they become the eyes and ears for the company to ensure that the company stays on track with product utility and innovation. This only comes when working with a customer either in commercial business where they need your product for their own production lines or to succeed in their own businesses. Or personal when they want to use your product for leisure and self-fulfilling reasons to complete their being. Sometimes products can be just an idea, but every product needs to be able to encounter skepticism and be able to overcome it... if you are going to be successful.

Therefore, I would start with the basics in salesmanship. Many years ago I went through it with the Xerox Selling Skills course which outlines the steps of selling which I would say stands the test of time as we humans really don't change... we just think we do.

I'm looking for economic model for the traveling salesman problem because it is a simple case of a much more complicated problem we are studying. We want to take the economic model and try to change it, so it fit out problem.

Sorry Oren, maybe I am having a problem in the language. Seems to me if you are trying to change a model that you already have it in hand?

That's true, we have a model which is defined as an operation research model (i.e. objective functions and constraints). Now we want to study the same problem from an economic point of view. The problem we're studying is a variant of the vehicle routing problem, which we want to try and define as an analytic model. The vehicle routing problem can be considered as an extension of TSP. Since TSP is a very old problem, we are sure that there are similar studies in the field that we can look at, and try to implement on our problem.

http://user.engineering.uiowa.edu/~dbricker/Stacks_pdf8/TSP_models.pdf

Don't know if this helps.

• Supplier chain. Transport of product parts from suppliers.
• Teacher's timetable. To find free class-rooms and free teacher for lessons, is an TSP problem, because you have to visit all lessons.
• Circuit drilling. The drilling machine have to go a way on a circuit board to drill the holes.

Travelling Salesman is an alignment question. It is everything with sorting (not search!).

If interested in this new perspective on TSP, see my project.

https://www.researchgate.net/project/Travelling-Salesman-Problem-with-Dynamic-Programming-and-Computational-Geometry-Approach