The travelling salesman problem, also known as the travelling salesperson problem (TSP), asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?" It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, important in theoretical computer science and operations research.

Operations research, often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve decision-making. The term management science is occasionally used as a synonym.