The Traveling Tourist Problem

The most talked close map of this calendar week has to live on Randy Olson's map showing a road-trip route across the United States, taking inwards the summit fifty major U.S. landmarks. Randy has genuinely created 2 maps, ane for the USA - Optimal Road Trip Across the U.S. as well as ane for Europe - the Optimal Road Trip Across Europe.

For both maps Randy took an arbitrary listing of the summit landmarks to catch as well as so fix close the chore every bit a Traveling Salesman problem. That is finding the shortest possible route that visits each landmark as well as returns to the rootage starting point.

To solve the work Randy used the Google Maps API as well as inwards detail the Google Maps API Directions Service. This enabled him to honor the shortest routes betwixt each landmark. He so created his ain genetic algorithm to create a route visiting each of the landmarks so that the full distance traveled betwixt them is every bit modest every bit possible.


Over the years on nosotros bring posted a give away of maps that help to solve the perennial Traveler Salesman Problem (TSP). Among the most interesting solutions has been the Forio Route Optimizer.

The developers at Forio decided that the TSP was non challenging plenty as well as thence fix themselves the additional challenge of finding the quickest route taking into describe organisation human relationship real-time traffic conditions. The resulting Forio Route Optimizer finds the quickest route, taking inwards a give away of stops as well as factoring inwards the actual traffic on the roads.

The Route Optimizer comes amongst a give away of representative routes inwards San Francisco, including a majority crawl as well as a sightseeing tour of the city. Forio has written-up an interesting weblog post on how the Route Optimizer was created, including a link to the source code of the Optimizer on GitHub.