Extremal bottleneck routing problem with constraints in the form of precedence conditions (Q735643)

Given \(N\) pairwise disjoint nonempty finite subsets \(M_i\) from a possibly infinite set \(X\), a cost function \(c\) from \(X\times X\) into the nonnegative reals and a starting element \(x\), the problem is to visit each subset exactly once under a certain class of precedence constraints while minimizing the maximal cost of the transitions induced by the traversal. Possible applications may arise in the area, of sea and air transportation as well as certain technological processes. The authors define curtailed problems and show how to determine the values of the Bellman function and based upon these construct an optimal route-path. The analysis is sound but with some overkill with respect to mathematical notations. The numerical experiment (reported in the paper) consists of exactly one example (27 subsets each of cardinality 12, chosen in a regular way from the Euclidean plane endowed with the Euclidean metric), which was solved up to optimality in about 30 minutes on a 2 GHz computer.