The Concorde TSP Solver is a program for solving the traveling salesman problem. It was written by David Applegate, Robert E. Bixby, Vašek Chvátal, and William J. Cook, in ANSI C, and is freely available for academic use.
Concorde has been applied to problems of gene mapping, protein function prediction, vehicle routing, conversion of bitmap images to continuous line drawings, scheduling ship movements for seismic surveys, and in studying the scaling properties of combinatorial optimization problems.
Hahsler & Hornik (2007) review both heuristic and exact solutions to the TSP; they call Concorde “a state of the art implementation” and state that it is “one of the best exact TSP solvers currently available.” Mulder & Wunsch (2003) add that Concorde “is widely regarded as the fastest TSP solver, for large instances, currently in existence.” In 2001, Concorde won a 5000 guilder prize from CMG for solving a vehicle routing problem the company had posed in 1996.