Traveling Salesmen Problem, Street Atlas 2009

Hello all. I am a new member of this forum.

Here is my situation. I have a job that requires me to ride on various roads in a designated City/County. There are no destinations or stops on these routes, just driving.

My question is: Is there any way for SA 2009 to automatically plan the most time efficient route for me, after I created my Start/VIA/Stop destinations?

I believe this type of logical route planning is called the "traveling salesmen problem"?

If this program isn't capable of doing such a thing, Can some of you please give me some examples of how I might want to do this myself? Thank you for your time.

Hi rcs1537,

to Laptop GPS World.

DeLorme Street Atlas 2009, as far as I can tell, cannot automatically optimize the order of the stops in a route, but users may do it manually. Go to Route tab, press the Advanced button, and there you may select the stop you wish to move. Click on the stop to highlight it, and then use the Up and Down buttons on the right, to move the stop up or down on the list of stops.

Doing it manually may be easy if you only have small number of stops, and if it is quite obvious by looking at the map, which stop should be the first, second, and so on. In other cases, it would be more helpful if the software could do the "thinking".

Hi there. Thank you very much for your reply!

I have a question for you though. If you had to drive every single road in a foreign city that you've never been in, how would you go about planning to do so?

You might want to take a look at Microsoft Streets & Trips as it has an excellent reorder function. Mobile PC also can perform that procedure too but I think S&T would be better for a travelling salesman environment.

Terry

rcs1537-

When you adding stops to a route, use INSERT rather than ADD. If you ADD the stops, the route goes in the order they were placed in the route, if you INSERT them, the route is calculated using the stops geographically.

In the route tab, to the right of the stop field, make sure it says INSERT and not ADD.

Shannon

Shannon,
Thanks for the information. I have now upgraded to SA 2009 and did a test using the insert via (using the yellow button). It appears to work great and quickly.

Terry

the insert feature works well for a small number of stops, but it still does not work well for a very large number of stops.

I've done some research on this issue and Streets & Trips seems to be best for this.