Slightly Improved Upper Bound on the Integrality Ratio for the $s-t$ Path TSP

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the integrality ratio of the standard LP relaxation for the metric $s-t$ Path TSP. We make a near-optimal choice for an auxiliary function used in the analysis of Traub and Vygen which leads to an improved upper bound on the integrality ratio of 1.5273.