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It is not cumbersome to deliver a package to one house in this town. It is cumbersome to deliver packages to, say, a hundred houses in this town, where every d

by lb1lf 8y ago

It is not cumbersome to deliver a package to one house in this town. It is cumbersome to deliver packages to, say, a hundred houses in this town, where every day, the houses with a scheduled delivery varies. If you are to load up your delivery vehicle efficiently, you need to have some idea as to the order the packages will be delivered in; this is made harder by the lackadaisical numbering and lack of street names.

kwhitefoot 8y ago
> you need to have some idea as to the order the packages will be delivered in No you don't. That's what route planning software is for. Trying to do it in your head is a waste of your time when a computer can do it faster and more reliably.
- lb1lf 8y ago
  ...but presumably route planning software is based around the concept of street names, which is a pretty universal concept? (I have no doubt a computer can solve this issue - but neither do I think logistics companies would create a fuss over this unless it was an actual issue; an educated guess is that this town's approach does not integrate well with whatever route planning software they are using (while not being a large enough market to defend the investment which would need to be made in order to serve it more efficiently - hence, we're stuck at cumbersome...))
  - kwhitefoot 8y ago
    The maps know where every house is so the software simply has to route to those coordinates. We know it works because Google Maps and all the others I tried do it already. So all that is needed is to get the coordinates for each address, ask the api for the time between each possible pair of locations plug it in to your favourite travelling salesman solver and start driving. This is hardly a difficult task, especially as pretty much all of it is already done by various companies already. For instance https://www.mapquest.com/routeplanner https://www.mapquest.com/routeplanner. It only covers the US but it doesn't look as though there would be any difficulty extending it to other countries. And this one, https://planner.myrouteonline.com/route-planner/1752/# https://planner.myrouteonline.com/route-planner/1752/#, works perfectly in Hilgermissen and has no trouble finding the houses and finding the optimal route.

by lb1lf 8y ago

kwhitefoot 8y ago

> you need to have some idea as to the order the packages will be delivered in No you don't. That's what route planning software is for. Trying to do it in your head is a waste of your time when a computer can do it faster and more reliably.

lb1lf 8y ago
...but presumably route planning software is based around the concept of street names, which is a pretty universal concept? (I have no doubt a computer can solve this issue - but neither do I think logistics companies would create a fuss over this unless it was an actual issue; an educated guess is that this town's approach does not integrate well with whatever route planning software they are using (while not being a large enough market to defend the investment which would need to be made in order to serve it more efficiently - hence, we're stuck at cumbersome...))
- kwhitefoot 8y ago
  The maps know where every house is so the software simply has to route to those coordinates. We know it works because Google Maps and all the others I tried do it already. So all that is needed is to get the coordinates for each address, ask the api for the time between each possible pair of locations plug it in to your favourite travelling salesman solver and start driving. This is hardly a difficult task, especially as pretty much all of it is already done by various companies already. For instance https://www.mapquest.com/routeplanner https://www.mapquest.com/routeplanner. It only covers the US but it doesn't look as though there would be any difficulty extending it to other countries. And this one, https://planner.myrouteonline.com/route-planner/1752/# https://planner.myrouteonline.com/route-planner/1752/#, works perfectly in Hilgermissen and has no trouble finding the houses and finding the optimal route.