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Stephen C. Jewett 



Institute of Marine Science 

 University of Alaska 

 Fairbanks, AK 99701 



A COMPUTER SOFTWARE SYSTEM FOR 

 OPTIMIZING SURVEY CRUISE TRACKS' 



Since 1972, the Southeast Fisheries Center, Na- 

 tional Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA, has been 

 conducting resource assessment surveys for 

 groundfish in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Ran- 

 dom sampling stations were selected and cruise 

 tracks plotted by hand requiring several man- 

 days of effort without assurance than an optimum 

 cruise track had been chosen. Consequently, a 

 computer routine was developed at the NMFS Na- 

 tional Fisheries Engineering Laboratory, Bay 

 Saint Louis, Miss., to satisfy two requirements: 

 Generate a set of randomly selected sampling sta- 

 tions from a preestablished station grid and 

 minimize the distance the vessel must travel to 

 sample each station once. This paper presents the 

 resultant routine, a comparison of results with 

 actual cruises, and a discussion of other possible 

 applications of the program. 



Background 



The problem of determining the optimum cruise 

 track to sample a given set of stations can be re- 

 stated as, "determining the shortest route from 

 one point to another which allows a vessel to visit 

 every station once." This problem is similar to one 

 in the field of operations research generally refer- 

 red to as "the traveling salesman problem." The 

 original formulation of the problem was to 

 minimize the time required by a traveling sales- 

 man to visit a number of cities and return home 

 (Bellmore and Nemhauser 1968). Several al- 

 gorithms have been developed which solve the 

 problem exactly; however, computer storage and 

 running time increase exponentially with the 

 number of points to be visited. Because the 

 groundfish surveys normally deal with station 

 numbers in excess of 100, an heuristic method of 

 solving the problern was selected. Lin and Ker- 

 nighan ( 1973) at the Bell Telephone Laboratories 

 (BTL) developed an approximate procedure for 

 solving traveling salesman problems with large 

 number of visitation points which appeared 

 applicable to cruise track optimization. ^ The Na- 

 tional Fisheries Engineering Laboratory obtained 



'Contribution No. 78-19F from the Southeast Fisheries 

 Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA, NSTL Sta- 

 tion, MS 39529. MARMAP Contribution No. 154. 



^To develop a feeling for the complexity of these problems, it 

 should be noted that for a given number of stations, n, there are 



706 



