A Fastest Roundtrip Finder for Google Maps

By   July 3, 2007

Imagine you are a salesperson and have to visit a number of customers. However, you want to spend as little time as possible driving. If you only have to visit two or three locations, it is usually easy to find the optimal route. You can use regular map services such as Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps or MapQuest to find the shortest path between two places. However, as the number of locations to visit grows, the task of finding the order in which to visit the locations becomes daunting.

Despair not, I have created OptiMap, the answer to all your roundtrip troubles. At least the troubles that involve 20 or less locations to visit. There might be time and fuel costs (and thus greenhouse gas emissions) to save here, but don’t come sue me later if you find a better route. The application is only as accurate as the data that Google Maps supplies to it. Furthermore, when 10 or more locations are entered, a heuristic called Ant Colony Optimization (with some other tricks, too) is applied instead of trying every possible ordering, so there’s no guarantee of finding the optimal route. The heuristic usually finds a solution impressively close to the optimal, however.

14 Comments on “A Fastest Roundtrip Finder for Google Maps

  1. teh_slasherer

    The map centres now on my local area. It’s impressive, Masterer.

  2. Daniel Odio

    Geir,

    I’ve blogged about your awesome tool, and I hope you don’t mind I’ve also framed it into my real estate website (let me know if you do mind!) You can see my blogging about it at: http://drodio.com/blog/?p=12 . Your tool is phenomenal!

  3. DARREN

    please can you let me have an optimap source, i can pay you, im looking for up to 60 points, via postcode entry

  4. Raymond T. Hightower

    Optimap is a great app: Great mashup between Google Maps and an age-old problem in mathematics.

    One of my clients likes the program, but since the distances are in kilometers (and not miles) he won’t be able to use it for his US-based business. Do you have any plans to display the distance information in miles?

    Thx, RTH

  5. Raymond T. Hightower

    Optimap is a great app: Great mashup between Google Maps and an age-old problem in mathematics.

    One of my clients likes the program, but since the distances are in kilometers (and not miles) he won\’t be able to use it for his US-based business. Do you have any plans to display the distance information in miles?

    Thx, RTH

  6. Jens Knutson

    OptiMap is freaking COOL – any chance you’ll include support for removing locations, too?

  7. geir

    I really wish I had a better user interface for OptiMap. I’m pretty sure you can remove locations just by clicking on their respective markers, though. I’m guessing you mean to remove locations after you have calculated a trip. I’ll add this to the TODO-list, but I’m unlikely to fix it in the first few weeks.

    Geir

  8. Brett

    Hey what happened to the Add to TomTom button on optimap… I use this app every day for work and without this button im lost!!!!

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  10. kali

    hi, this tool is brilliant! I am writing my thesis about the traveling salesman problem and the problem of routing, your tool is very convenient to use, much simpler than counting the shortest route in the Solver. Are you planning develop Optimap and adding options for adding conditions? I mean, for example, the addition of time windows for each point. Anyway, good job!

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