The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) has been around for quite some time. I provided a brief explanation of TSP in another post here, so make sure to check it out. Solving TSP has been a challenge because it is an NP-Hard problem, so it becomes more difficult as you have more cities in your dataset. The search space will grow at a rate of 2n! (N is the total number of cities or destinations).
There are a number of alternatives when you don’t really have the urgency to obtain the best optimal solution but rather want a good solution within a short time. One of the tools that can be leveraged is Excel’s built-in Solver, which can provide the solution.