Interestingly I was reading a paper about this the other day: http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/ioerger/ICAI04-linli1.pdf http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/ioerger/ICAI04-li

Interestingly I was reading a paper about this the other day: http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/ioerger/ICAI04-linli1.pdf http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/ioerger/ICAI04-linli1.pdf It uses textbooks as its example too :) There seems to be a reasonable amount of literature on algorithms for this kind of combinatorial optimisation, including reasonably fast but well-performing heuristics like the above. Maybe amazon should pull their finger out.