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by cropsieboss
3233 days ago
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Pickup and delivery optimizing algorithms have been optimizing stuff in private businesses for years. What do you think what kinds of algorithm makes schedules for trashbin collection, newspaper delivery, sodapop machines etc. If you aren't ondemand and there's multiple drivers there is someone who can optimize it to (almost) optimality. This is a pickup & delivery problem and the algorithms exist and work in practice for decades. |
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I work within the trash collection industry and we've tried several different optimization schemes that in general don't come close to optimal efficiency. The marketing for a lot of the optimization companies would lead you to believe that they're able to unlock a lot more efficiency than they actually deliver. Our clients that have applied algorithms to optimize their routes quickly reverted to human optimization since the algorithms fail to provide any benefit and typically require tremendous effort to get started.
I would love to discover an algorithm that is able to consistently provide actually optimized collection routes without hand holding!