August 5, 2013 in Thinking Analytically
Self-driving car
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https://doi.org/10.1287/LYTX.2013.04.14
Self-driving cars are cars that can drive themselves without a human behind the wheel. This technology should be available in the not-too-distant future. New algorithms will need to be developed to help route these cars to get their passengers to their desired destinations efficiently.
Figure 1 shows 10 people in need of transportation. Their current location (the pick-up point) is indicated by the person icon and their desired destination (the drop-off location) is indicated by the building icon. The purple arrow indicates the path from the pickup location to the drop-off location. Your job is to order the passengers so that they are picked up in an order that minimizes the total distance travelled by the self-driving car.
Question: What is the minimum distance the car must travel in order to transport all of the passengers from their pick-up points to their drop-off points?
Send your answer to [email protected] by Sept. 15. The winner, chosen randomly from correct answers, will receive a Magic 8 Ball. Past questions can be found at puzzlor.com.
John Toczek is the AVP Predictive Modeling at Chubb in the Decision Analytics and Predictive Modeling department. He earned his BSc. in Chemical Engineering at Drexel University (1996) and his MSc. in Operations Research from Virginia Commonwealth University (2005).