LIN318 appeared in a 1973 paper by S. Lin and B. W. Kernighan. The the data set consists of 318 points that arose in a drilling application, where the drill was a pulsed laser. Lin and Kernighan write that they obtained the data set from R. Habermann. This instance was first solved by H. Crowder and M. W. Padberg in 1980. The data set is part of the TSPLIB

318 drilling points