The Traveling Salesman Problem with Traffic

Over the years on Google Maps Mania we have posted a number of maps that help to solve the perennial Traveler Salesman Problem (TSP). The TSP is the challenge of finding the shortest route which takes in a number of waypoints.

The developers at Forio decided that the TSP was not challenging enough and so set themselves the additional challenge of finding the quickest route taking into account real-time traffic conditions. The resulting Forio Route Optimizer finds the quickest route, taking in a number of stops and factoring in the actual traffic on the roads.

The Route Optimizer comes with a number of example routes in San Francisco, including a book crawl and a sightseeing tour of the city.

Forio has written-up an interesting blog post on how the Route Optimizer was created, including a link to the source code of the Optimizer on GitHub.