Revue du Journal arabe des affaires et de la gestion

Optimum Route to All Seven Emirates: A Travelling Salesman Approach

Abstract

Fernando MM*, Prasad V, Shaikh MI

United Arab Emirates has seven emirates namely Abu Dhabi (capital), Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al Quwain, Ras al Khaimah and Fujairah (Al Ain being counted within Abu Dhabi). This limited number of emirates though small in number but pose a great challenge when transportation among all the emirates is a task to be done optimally. Our study focuses on an application of Travelling salesman problem using assignment technique (operations research) which considers all the seven emirates including Al Ain as a separate emirate only for experiment reasons since the large distance between Al Ain and other emirates is not negligible. If there are n cities through which a salesman has to pass without passing any of the cities twice, there are (n-1)! ways through all the cities but there is one and only one optimum solution to it which has the minimum cost associated with it as well as the distance is the least among all the other routes. Similarly, these eight emirates give us (8-1)!=5040 ways to find the optimum route with minimum cost to travel between all emirates without visiting any emirate twice.