Integer programming formulations for the elementary shortest path problem

Given a directed graph G=(V,A) with arbitrary arc costs, the Elementary Shortest Path Problem (ESPP) consists of finding a minimum-cost path between two nodes s and t such that each node of G is visited at most once. If negative costs are allowed, the problem is NP-hard. In this paper, several integer programming formulations for the ESPP are compared. We present analytical results based on a polyhedral study of the formulations, and computational experiments where we compare their linear programming relaxation bounds and their behavior within a branch-and-cut framework. The computational results show that a formulation with dynamically generated cutset inequalities is the most effective.