On the convergence of a new time window discretization method for the traveling salesman problem with time window constraints

In this paper, we discuss convergence of a time window discretization method for the traveling salesman problem with time window constraints. This recently proposed discretization method leads to a lower bound to the minimization problem. Analysis shows that this method always guarantees convergence to the optimal solution. We also illustrate that the traditional method that gives feasible solutions does not always provide such a guarantee.