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This is a modification of the classical Traveling Salesman Problem.
Given is a complete undirected graph with $N$ nodes (cities) divided into $M$ groups, each group represents certain region. The goal is to find a shortest possible route that visits each region exactly once and returns to the origin city.
Remark: Each group (region) is represented in the solution by a single node.
Quality of solution is determined by the length of the route, that is to be minimized.
If solved as a pure black-box optimization problem, one could use information about cities locations and distance matrix only in the evaluation function. Here, it is allowed to use or analyze such a kind of information elsewhere as well, e.g., in recombination operators.