I have looked at rome2rio and few other sites, but it did not fit what I was looking for. I want an application or site, where in, if I feed it a list of cities it should tell me which city should be my starting point and what cities I need to traverse (with specific order) and what should be my final destination. I am mainly looking for travelling by road. The whole purpose is I need to make sure that I do not travel back and forth and waste time, I should travel optimally.
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8In other words, you want to solve the traveling salesman problem (or at least the real-world practical version of the problem). – Zach Lipton May 15 '16 at 07:03
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For travel by road, I think a map will be enough. Maybe something like ViaMichelin or Google maps, which will also include road connections and some other information like tolls and where you will find ferries. – Willeke May 15 '16 at 08:48
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Worth a look: http://travel.stackexchange.com/a/22071/32134 – mts May 15 '16 at 19:44
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The problem that you state is known in academia as the Traveling Salesman Problem as pointed out by @ZachLipton.
Googling for that expression in combination with app/website/software gives a few good finds.
As apps I could find e.g. Concorde TSP and Route4Me (no affiliation nor experience).
A nice online tool is Optimap which seems to use Google directions. Here is a random route along the US east coast. You can choose between a roundtrip and or ending up in a different city than where you started from.
mts
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Yes, I had studied Travelling Salesman, Shortest path first and other networking problems during my computer science degree :) But I was curious if any of the websites provide a close solution. The above ones are sufficient for me for now. – Sandeep May 22 '16 at 04:54