Proc. AAAI-93 Spring Symp. on AI and NP-Hard Problems, Standord, CA, March 23-25, 1993, pp.160-6.

Truncated Branch-and-Bound: 
A Case Study on the Asymmetric TSP
Weixiong Zhang
Computer Science Department
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA 90024
zhang@cs.ucla.edu
ABSTRACT We further extend the idea of adapting BnB for ap-
proximate solutions to large combinatorial optimization
Branch-and-bound (BnB) is a general problem problems, and compare it to other approximation al-
solving paradigm, especially useful for nd- gorithms. In particular, we present an approximation
ing optimal solutions to most NP-hard com- method based on BnB, called truncated BnB, on the
binatorial problems. In fact, BnB can also asymmetric traveling salesman problem. Given n cities
be adapted as an ecient approximation al- f1; 2; :::; ng and a cost matrix (ci;j ) that denes the cost
gorithm, providing a promising new alterna- between each pair of cities, the traveling salesman prob-
tive in practice. We show this by an ap-
proximation scheme for the asymmetric trav-
eling salesman problem (ATSP). Our method
is BnB truncated at dierent stopping points,
depending upon the total computation avail-
able. Experiments indicate that this method
is superior to a local search algorithm that is
the best existing approximation algorithm for
the ATSP.
1 Introduction and Overview
Many practical problems, such as planning and schedul-
ing, are computationally intractable, meaning that they
cannot be solved exactly with limited computation time
and memory. In reality, we often do not need opti-
mal solutions, but rather good ones that can be found
quickly. Therefore, approximation algorithms are of
considerable practical importance.
Branch-and-bound (BnB) [15, 2, 13] is a general
lem (TSP) is to nd a minimum-cost tour that visits
each city once and returns to the starting city. When
the cost from city i to city j is not necessarily equal to
that from city j to city i, the problem is the asymmetric
TSP (ATSP). We choose the ATSP as our benchmark
problem because it is an important problem, and many
NP-complete problems can be formulated as ATSPs,
such as vehicle routing, workshop scheduling, computer
wiring, etc [14]. Although we present the approxima-
tion method on the ATSP, our algorithm can be simply
applied to other problems as well.
We empirically compare our approximation method to
a local search algorithm of [9], the best existing ap-
proximation algorithm for the ATSP we found in the
literature. Given a non-optimal complete tour, a local
search algorithm repeatedly improves the tour by local
perturbations [16, 9, 8]. In our experiments, we consid-
ered many ATSPs with dierent cost matrix structures.
The cost matrices we used include random matrices,
matrices with the triangle inequality, random matrices
with ci;j from f0; 1; :::; i  j g, matrices converted from
problem-solving paradigm for nding optimal solutions no-wait workshop scheduling for 4 machines, which is
to NP-complete [6] combinatorial optimization prob- known to be NP-complete [20], and matrices from real
lems. Although it was originally developed for optimal problems [18]. Our empirical results indicate that the
solutions, it can, in fact, be adapted for nding approx-
imate solutions as well. The idea, which is well-known
in operations research, is to terminate the execution of
BnB whenever the limits of computational resources are
met. The previous research on this idea is very prelim-
inary. It has only been applied to job-shop scheduling
problems with two machines and up to 50 jobs [1, 12],
and simulated on a tree model [7].
 The research was supported by NSF Grant #IRI-
9119825, a grant from Rockwell International, and a GTE
fellowship.
average tour quality from our method is better than
that from the local search algorithm, with less or com-
parable computation time. Thus, the new approxima-
tion algorithm provides a promising alternative in prac-
tice.
Section 2 discusses the approximation algorithm for the
ATSP, and Section 3 presents the experimental results.
Our discussion is in Section 4, and conclusions appear
in Section 5. For interested readers, the detailed de-
scription and experimental results of the local search
algorithm of [9] can be found in [25]. 1 4
2 32

2 Truncated BnB on the ATSP E={(2,3)}

5 6
E={(3,2)}
I={} I={(2,3)}
2.1 Introduction: Branch-and-Bound 1 4
A B
2 3 1 4
Since our new approximation method is based on 2 54 3
the branch-and-bound (BnB) subtour elimination al-
6 3
6 5
gorithm [2] for optimally solving the ATSP, we rst E={(3,2),(6,2)} E={(3,2),(3,6)}
describe this algorithm. I={(2,3)} I={(2,3),(6,2)}

The BnB subtour elimination algorithm uses the as- C D

signment problem as a lower-bound function. Given n 2 3 6 6 2 3
cities and a cost matrix (ci;j ), the assignment problem 4 1 5
5
4 1 5
3
(AP) [17] is to assign to each city i another city j , with
ci;j as the cost of this assignment, such that the to-
tal cost of all assignments is minimized. The AP is a Figure 1: BnB subtour elimination on the ATSP.
generalization of the ATSP without the restriction of
a single tour, allowing collections of disjoint subtours.
Specically, the solution of the AP is a permutation of The process of subproblem selection and decomposi-
the n cities which is either a complete tour, or a collec- tion repeats until all active subproblems have AP costs
tion of subtours, and can be computed in O(n3) time greater than or equal to the cost of the best tour ob-
[17]. If the AP solution happens to be a complete tour, tained so far, or no active subproblems remain. More
it is the solution to the ATSP as well.
Figure 1 is a simple example of BnB subtour elimina-
tion. The edge costs and the calculation of the AP costs
are not shown. The AP solution to the original ATSP
contains two subtours that are in the oval at the root of
the tree. Assume that the cost of the AP solution is 2,
as shown in the black box. The subtour 2 3 2 is cho-
sen to be eliminated. The problem is then decomposed
into two subproblems, subproblem A with cost 4, and
subproblem B with cost 3. The lowest-cost subproblem,
B , is selected for decomposition next. By breaking the
subtour 2 3 6 2, subproblem B produces subprob-
lems C and D. D is the next lowest-cost subproblem
among all undecomposed ones, A, C and D. The AP
solution to D is a complete tour. The algorithm termi-
nates with the complete tour in node D, and its cost 3,
since subproblems A and C have costs greater than 3,
and hence cannot generate a better solution than the
one in node D (explained below).
specically, with an active list A, containing all active
subproblems, a variable BT , representing the best tour
obtained so far, and its cost U , the process of BnB
subtour elimination is as follows.
1. (Initialization) Set the active list A = fX0 g, the
best tour BT = ;, and its cost U = 1, where X0
is the original problem to be solved.
2. (Subproblem selection) If A = ;, stop. BT is an
optimal tour with cost U .
Otherwise, select an X 2 A, and remove it from
A.
3. (Lower-bounding) Let AP be the assignment prob-
lem of X , and ApT be its solution, whose cost is
C.
If C  U , go to 2. (This subproblem is pruned.)
If C < U and ApT is a single tour, BT = ApT ,
U = C , and go to 2. (This is a better tour.)
Otherwise, go to 4.
BnB subtour elimination rst solves the AP for all n
cities. If the solution is not a single tour, then the prob-
lem is decomposed into subproblems by excluding dif-
ferent arcs in a subtour, which eliminates the subtour.
A subproblem has some excluded arcs that are forbid-
den from its solution, and some included arcs that must
4. (Decomposition) Expand X , generating subprob-
lems X1 ; X2; :::; Xt, with the costs of their AP so-
lutions C1; C2; :::; Ct, respectively.
A = A [ fXi jCi < U; i = 1; 2; :::;tg. Go to 2.
The original problem has empty excluded and included
be present in its solution, and is used to decompose the
problem space into mutually exclusive components. A
subproblem is then selected from all subproblems that
have been generated but not decomposed, which are
called active subproblems. If the AP solution to this
selected subproblem is a complete tour, and its cost is
less than the cost of the current best tour found, then
the current best tour is replaced by the AP solution to
this subproblem, and another subproblem is selected.
sets. A newly generated subproblem rst inherits its ex-
cluded and included sets from its parent, and adds one
new excluded arc to its excluded set, and new included
arcs, if any, to its included set. Since a subproblem
has more excluded and included arcs, and thus is more
constrained than its parent, less choices of arcs are left
for the AP to the subproblem than for the AP to its
parent. Therefore, the AP cost is monotonically nonde-
creasing, in the sense that the AP costs of subproblems
along a path starting at the root can only increase.
(j)
Two common strategies can be used to select a subprob- i
lem from all active ones. The best-rst strategy chooses
a subproblem with the minimum AP cost among all ac- (i) j
tive subproblems. The depth-rst strategy selects a sub-
problem which was most recently generated, and has a Figure 2: An (i; j )-patching operation.
minimum AP cost among its siblings. One important
feature of the best-rst strategy is that all subproblems
selected have costs less than or equal to the cost of the tree links between a node and its children represent the
optimal solution to the entire problem. The best-rst
strategy generates the fewest subproblems, among all
strategies using the same monotonic cost function [4].
To this end, it needs to store all active subproblems in
A, whose size is usually exponential in the maximum
search depth. Because of this exponential space require-
decomposition of the parent, and leaf nodes are sub-
problems whose AP solutions are complete tours.
2.2 Truncated BnB for Approximate
Solutions
ment, the best-rst strategy is only applicable to small The BnB subtour elimination algorithm can also be
problems in practice. In contrast, the depth-rst strat-
egy only maintains the subproblems on the path from
original problem to the subproblem that is now being
considered, plus their immediate siblings, and thus the
space used is only linear in the maximum search depth.
It may, however, decompose subproblems whose costs
are greater than the cost of the solution to the initial
problem.
Which subtour to eliminate, and how to expand a prob-
lem constitute the decomposition rule. One such rule is
due to Carpaneto and Toth [3]. A subtour is chosen
such that the number of newly generated subproblems
is as small as possible, in order to reduce the total num-
ber of subproblems generated. Since excluding one arc
of a subtour is sucient for eliminating the subtour, a
subtour with the minimum number of free arcs, ones
neither included nor excluded in the corresponding AP
solution, is selected for elimination. Subproblems are
generated in such a way that they are mutually exclu-
sive, so that there are no duplicate subproblems. Let I
be the included set and E the excluded set of the sub-
problem to be expanded, and let X = fx1; x2; :::; xtg
be the arcs that are neither included nor excluded from
the subproblem. The k-th newly generated subproblem
then has included set Ik and excluded set Ek satisfying
 and join them by an (i; j )-patching operation that has
Ek = E [ fxk g;
Ik = I [ fx1; x2; :::; xk 1g;
for k = 1; 2; :::; t, where [ stands for the set union oper-
ation. Since xk is an excluded arc of the k-th subprob-
lem, xk 2 Ek , and it is an included arc of the k + 1-st
augmented by an upper-bound function. This func-
tion is applied to a subproblem whose AP solution is
not a single tour, and constructs a single tour based on
the subproblem. The tour cost thus obtained is greater
than or equal to the cost of an optimal tour for the sub-
problem, and thus gives an upper bound on the optimal
tour cost to this subproblem.
Karp and Steele's patching algorithm [10, 11] can serve
as an upper-bound function. This algorithm also uses
the AP algorithm, plus a post-processing operation.
Let i and j be two cities that appear in two disjoint
subtours, as shown in Figure 2. The (i; j )-patching op-
eration joins the subtours into one by inserting the arcs
(i;  (j )) and (j;  (i)) and deleting the arcs (i;  (i)) and
(j;  (j )), where  (i) is the successor of i in the subtour.
This operation changes the total cost by

(; i; j ) = ci; (j ) + cj; (i) ci; (i) cj; (j ):

(; i; j ) is called the cost of the (i; j )-patching oper-
ation. Using this operation, the patching algorithm
works as follows. First solve the AP of the n cities,
resulting in a permutation  . If  is a single tour, it is
also a solution to the ATSP. If  is not a single tour,
select two subtours with the largest numbers of arcs,
minimum cost. Recursively apply the above process to
the remaining subtours until  becomes a tour. This al-
gorithm has the same complexity as the AP algorithm,
which is O(n3 ).
By applying an upper-bound function to every gener-
subproblem, xk 2 Ik+1 , a tour obtained from the k-th ated internal node of search tree, best-rst search al-
subproblem does not contain arc xk , but a tour ob- ways has a feasible solution available. The quality of the
tained from the k + 1-st subproblem must have arc xk . best solution obtained so far increases with the num-
Thus a tour from the k-th subproblem cannot be gen- ber of nodes generated up to that point. Moreover, the
erated from the k + 1-st one, and vice versa. In other upper-bound function signicantly impacts depth-rst
words, all generated subproblems are mutually exclu-
sive. Therefore, the state space of the ATSP under
Carpaneto and Toth's decomposition rule can be rep-
resented by a search tree, in which the root represents
the initial problem, non-root nodes are subproblems,
BnB. Although depth-rst search may nd feasible so-
lutions during the search without an upper-bound func-
tion, the quality of the best solution found so far can
be improved by the upper-bound function. In addition,
an upper bound on a node can reduce the overall up-
per bound for searching the subproblem space, which in has the minimum AP cost as the next current problem,
turn reduces the number of subproblems decomposed. and repeats the above process. Overall, this algorithm
One common feature of best-rst search and depth-rst
search augmented by an upper-bound function is that
there exists a feasible solution at any point during the
search. Therefore, when augmented by an upper-bound
function, BnB is an anytime algorithm, meaning that
it can stop at any time and provide a solution whose
quality improves with the total amount of computa-
tion time used. The BnB subtour elimination algorithm
augmented by the patching algorithm is an anytime al-
gorithm for the ATSP.
Our approximation scheme is very simple. It executes
the BnB subtour elimination algorithm, augmented by
searches along one particular path from the root of the
search tree to a leaf node. This stopping criterion is
also called nonbacktrack BnB and was implemented on
two-machine scheduling problems [1, 12].
3 Experimental Results
We compared TBnB with the local search algorithm
of [9], the best existing approximation algorithm for
the ATSP we found in literature. The local search al-
gorithm repeatedly improves a given initial tour, which
may not be optimal, by local perturbations. As a start-
the patching algorithm which is applied to a generated
subproblem whose AP solution is not a complete tour,
and terminates after an optimal tour is found, or when
the total available computation time runs out. The best
tour thus obtained is then used as an approximate solu-
tion. Since this method is simply BnB subtour elimina-
tion, truncated at dierent stopping points depending
upon the total available computation, we call this ap-
proximation scheme truncated BnB, or TBnB for short.
The patching algorithm and the original BnB subtour
elimination algorithm are special cases of TBnB. If the
algorithm stops without decomposing the original prob-
lem only after applying the patching algorithm, it de-
generates to the patching algorithm. If the algorithm
terminates after all subproblems whose AP costs are
less than the current best tour cost are decomposed,
it becomes the original BnB subtour elimination algo-
rithm. If the algorithm stops in the middle of these
ing point, we rst examined all polynomial-time tour
construction algorithms we found in the literature, in-
cluding nearest neighbor [5, 8], nearest insertion [5, 8],
greedy [5, 8], repeated assignment [5] and Karp and
Steele's patching algorithm [10, 11]. The best algo-
rithm was then used to build the initial tour for the
local search1 , so that our experimental comparison was
set on a fair basis. From our experiments, the best
polynomial-time initial tour construction algorithm was
the patching algorithm.
We used the following dierent cost matrix structures:
(a) random matrices with ci;j from f0; 1; 2; :::231 1g;
(b) matrices with the triangle inequality; (c) random
matrices with ci;j from f0; 1; :::; i  j g, which are known
to be more dicult for many methods based on AP
algorithms [19]; (d) matrices converted from no-wait
workshop scheduling for 4 machines; and (e) matri-
ces from some actual problems encountered in industry
two extreme cases, it provides a tour whose cost lies in
between the tour cost from the patching algorithm on
the original problem, and the optimal tour cost. The
tour cost decreases with the total computation time,
and converges to the optimal tour cost if the total com-
putation time is unconstrained.
[18]. We use a large cost range for the rst structure be-
cause there exists an average-case complexity transition
for BnB subtour elimination [23, 24, 25]. In particular,
the ATSP is relatively easy to solve when the range r of
intercity costs is small, with respect to the number of
cities n. Since r  n, the problem instances we chose
We use the depth-rst search strategy, and choose a are also relatively dicult for our new approximation
particular stopping point to implement TBnB. It rst method, since it is based on BnB subtour elimination.
solves the AP of the n cities. If the solution is a tour, For problems with cost matrices satisfying the triangle
it terminates with this tour as the nal solution, which
is optimal. If the solution is a set of subtours, it con-
structs a complete tour by the patching algorithm, and
takes its cost as an upper bound . It then generates
all children of the current subproblem using Carpaneto
and Toth's decomposition rule. It ignores those children
inequality, we rst generated random matrices as above,
and then used a closure algorithm to enforce the trian-
gle inequality, ci;j  ci;k + ck;j , for all i; j; k 2 (ci;j ).
For the ATSPs with ci;j in f0; 1; :::; i  j g, we chose
ci;j independently and uniformly from f0; 1; :::;i  j g.
For the ATSPs corresponding to no-wait scheduling, we
whose AP costs are greater than or equal to , since so-
lutions from them will not be better than the best tour
obtained so far. The remaining newly generated child
problems (not all active subproblems) constitute a set
R. If R is empty, it stops with the best tour obtained so
far as an approximate solution. If the AP solution of a
problem in R is a complete tour, it terminates with this
tour. If none of the AP solutions of the subproblems in
R is a complete tour, it takes the subproblem in R which
rst generated random scheduling problems, by setting
the required processing time of a job on a machine to
be an integer31independently and uniformly chosen from
f0; 1; 2; :::; 2 1g, and then converted the scheduling
problems into ATSPs using the method suggested in
[22].
1
Detailed descriptions of our experiments on the
polynomial-time tour construction algorithms and the local
search algorithm are in [25].
We implemented the initial tour construction algo-
rithms, local search algorithm, and our new approxima-
tion method in C and ran them on a Sun4/sparc-460
with 32 Mbytes of memory. The problems were in the
range of 100 to 1000 cities, in 100 city increments. For
100-city to 500-city instances, all results are averages of
Both algorithms were also tested on constructed ATSPs
that are dicult for the local search algorithm [21]. For
an ATSP with n = 6k cities, there is an optimal tour
with cost 0, and (k 1)! local optimums that have arbi-
trarily large costs. Not surprisingly, the local search al-
gorithm stops at a local minimum which is not a global
1000 trials each, and for 600- to 1000-cities, the results optimal, while TBnB nds the optimal tour by expand-
are averages of 100 trials each. ing only the original problem and generating four sub-
Figure 3 summarizes our results. Since the local search problems.
algorithm and TBnB use the patching algorithm as
starting point, we also include the performance of the
patching algorithm for comparison. The horizontal axes
4 Discussion
of the gures are the numbers of cities. For the gures The good performance of TBnB is due primarily to
in the left column, the vertical axes are the relative er- the AP lower-bound function. As observed in pre-
rors of tour costs with respect to the AP lower bounds, vious research [2] and in our experiments, the AP
which is less than the actual relative errors. For the lower-bound function is very eective. In our exper-
gures in the right column, the vertical axes are the
CPU times of the algorithms. The relative tour error
of TBnB is less than 1:5% for 100-city problems, and
decreases to less than 0:15% for 1000-city instances on
all cost matrices. On random matrices and matrices
with ci;j chosen from f0; 1; :::;i  j g, the relative tour
iments on the random ATSP with the elements of
cost matrices independently and uniformly chosen from
f0; 1; 2; :::; 231 1g, the AP cost is 99.090% of the ATSP
cost on the average for 100-city instances, 99.816% for
500-city instances, and 99.916% for 1000-city instances.
errors of TBnB are signicantly smaller than those of The eciency of TBnB is also due to the ATSP search
the local search, and the execution time of TBnB is tree under BnB subtour elimination, which has inter-
competitive. On matrices with the triangle inequality, nal nodes whose AP solutions are not complete tours.
TBnB signicantly outperforms the local search, both
in terms of tour quality and execution time. For the
ATSP from no-wait workshop scheduling, the relative
tour errors of both TBnB and local search are less than
0:03% in all cases. Meanwhile, TBnB takes much less
CPU time than the local search. The cost matrices
Thus BnB searches the space of all city permutations,
while the local search explores only the space of cyclic
city permutations. In addition, by the patching algo-
rithm, TBnB considers only those subproblems whose
AP costs are less than the initial upper bound, which
decreases during the search. Thus the subproblems ex-
from no-wait scheduling problems are also subject to plored by TBnB have small AP costs, and the nal tour
the triangle inequality [9]. This suggests that TBnB cost can be signicantly smaller than the initial upper
is a better approximation algorithm when the triangle bound.
inequality is satised.
We also examined TBnB on two particular problems
from industry [18], a 23-city and a 43-city ATSP. These
two problems have AP costs 85 and 43, but optimal
ATSP costs 259 and 5620, respectively. The BnB sub-
tour elimination algorithm is not ecient on these prob-
To reiterate, the tour quality can be continuously im-
proved by TBnB if it keeps backtracking when more
computation time is available.
The average complexity of TBnB is determined by the
average depth of the leaf nodes in the search tree. In
our experiments, the average depth of leaf nodes was
lems. Although the fast algorithm in [19] nds an ap-
proximate tour of cost 5625 to the 43-city ATSP al-
most immediately, it cannot optimally solve this prob-
lem [18]. For the 43-city problem, our implementation
of BnB subtour elimination with Carpaneto and Toth's
less than ln(n) on average for all cost matrices used.
The AP of the initial problem can be solved in O(n3 )
time, and the AP of an internal tree node can be incre-
mentally solved in O(n2) time [17]. Since a tree node
has at most n children, the average3complexity of TBnB
decomposition rules and the depth-rst strategy does appears to be approximately O(n ln(n)) from our ex-
not nd an optimal tour after generating 30 million sub- periments.
problems, and a best-rst strategy runs out of memory
on a 32 Mbyte machine. TBnB nds an optimal tour of
cost 259 on the 23-city problem, while the local search
stops at a non-optimal tour of cost 262. For the 43-city
5 Conclusions
ATSP, TBnB nds a tour of cost 5623 in 1 second of
CPU time by expanding 54 subproblems and generat-
ing 173 subproblems. This result is slightly better than
the tour of cost 5627 from the local search algorithm,
also with 1 second of CPU time.
Branch-and-bound (BnB) is not only a general
problem-solving technique for optimally solving most
NP-hard combinatorial problems, but can also be
adapted to an ecient approximation algorithm. We
presented such an algorithm for the asymmetric travel-
ing salesman problem (ATSP). Our experiments indi-
 error relative to AP (%) CPU time (s)
9.0
patch matrix with 140 TBnB
matrix with
31 31
7.0 c(i,j) from {0,1,2,...,2 -1} c(i,j) from {0,1,2,...,2 -1}
100
5.0 full local search
full local search 60
3.0

1.0 TBnB 20 patch

200 400 600 800 1000 200 400 600 800 1000
# of cities CPU time (sec.) # of cities
error relative to AP (%)
5.0 matrix with 250 matrix with TBnB
4.0 c(i,j) from {0,1,...,i*j} c(i,j) from {0,1,...,i*j}
200
patch full local search
3.0 150
2.0 100
full local search patch
1.0 50
TBnB
0 0
200 400 600 800 1000 200 400 600 800 1000
# of cities # of cities
error relative to AP (%) CPU time (sec.)
patch 120
1.2 matrix with triangle inequality
matrix with triangle inequality
80 full local search
0.8
TBnB
0.4 40
full local search patch
TBnB
0 0
200 400 600 800 1000 200 400 600 800 1000
error relative to AP (%) # of cities CPU time (sec.) # of cities
patch 800 full local search
0.04
nowait scheduling
0.03 600 nowait scheduling
full local search
0.02 400
TBnB
0.01 200
patch
TBnB
0 0
200 400 600 800 1000 200 400 600 800 1000
# of cities # of cities

Figure 3: Comparison of patching, local search, and truncated BnB.

cate that the new algorithm is superior to a local search
algorithm, which is the best existing approximation al-
gorithm for the ATSP.
We are extending the idea of developing new approx-
imation algorithms using BnB, to other NP-complete
combinatorial problems, including the symmetric TSP
and scheduling problems.
Acknowledgements
[11] Karp, R.M., and J.M. Steele, \Probabilistic anal-
ysis of heuristic," in The Traveling Salesman Prob-
lem, E.L. Lawler, et al. (eds.) John Wiley & Sons,
1985, pp.181-205.
[12] Kohler, W.H., and K. Steiglitz, \Enumerative and
iterative computational approaches," in Computer
and Job-Shop Scheduling Theory, E.G. Coman, Jr.
(ed.) John Wiley & Sons, 1976.
[13] Kumar, V., \Search, branch-and-bound," in En-
I gratefully acknowledge helpful discussions with
Richard Karp, David Johnson, Donald Miller, Joseph
Pekny and Bruno Repetto, comments from David John-
son and Donald Miller on an early draft. Special thanks
are due to my advisor, Rich Korf, for support, discus-
sions, comments and many draft readings.
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