I am trying to plan a complex trip that I have to take soon. There are some issues that are making the trip difficult to plan:
- There are several stops
- There are time constraints for both the whole trip and for some of the stops
- It will be by bus, so each stop will have to coincide just right to avoid missing a bus
- The busses arrvie at the different stops at numerous, and varying times
- Some stops are in places inaccessible by bus, and must be walked to
- Some stops can be rearranged while others must be in a specific order
I have spent hours trying to plan this trip, coordinating the numerous aspects but it is proving to be frustratingly difficult to do by hand. I have all of the numbers (bus schedules, walking time estimates, stopping time estimates, etc.), but manually finding an optimal route is eluding me.
Obviously this is exactly the sort of task that computers are perfect for. The problem is that I cannot find a program, website, algorithm, etc. that I can use to plan the trip. (I have already decided to write such a program at some point, but it would definitely take a while, so it wouldn’t help with this trip. Besides, if something already exists, then there’s no point reinventing the wheel.)
Does anyone know of a way to accomplish this?
Ideally, it won’t be just a trip-scheduling program/site/algorithm, but something that can be used to optimize any sort of group of items (e.g., if you had a bunch of files of varying sizes—some of which must go together—and wanted to put them on as few DVDs as possible, it could pick the ones that would fit best).
