Wow, that's very cool -- I remember thinking about elevator scheduling in the past as an interesting theoretical problem. Scheduling algorithms for taxis, bus s

Wow, that's very cool -- I remember thinking about elevator scheduling in the past as an interesting theoretical problem. Scheduling algorithms for taxis, bus services, and similar systems is another related problem that seems interesting. A friend of mine spent some time writing software and setting up a small compute cluster to solve variants of the traveling salesman problem for a courier service. More broadly, I think there are many situations in which CS can be applied to yield an incremental improvement in some every-day task where the standard solution is perfectly reasonable, but could be made by efficient by an intelligent algorithm. As the cost of building in these algorithms continues to decrease (and as WiFi + RFID becomes more pervasive), the number of problems for which it will be feasible to apply a sophisticated solution will continue to increase. An incremental improvement in a single elevator's dispatch time might not mean all that much, but when it's applied to tens of thousands of elevators that operate every day, that's a nice productivity hack.