I-Corps: Optimization Algorithms for Mapping

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to provide organizations with easy access to efficient logistical planning. The project will potentially assist emerging businesses and other organizations by providing optimization services in road maps such as finding delivery routes, selecting locations for new facilities, and selecting routes for cables or pipes. This allows organizations facing such problems to focus on their core mission and outsource the optimization. This project will enable such organizations to provide better service at lower cost. This I-Corps project draws on substantial research aimed at developing of efficient algorithms for finding optimal and near-optimal solutions to optimization problems in planar networks, networks that can be drawn on a flat surface. Since road maps are mostly planar, these algorithms can be adapted to work on road maps. The project builds on an implementation of the underlying algorithmic methods. The implementation can very quickly find high-quality solutions even for very large networks. The project will explore the commercialization of algorithmic techniques in real-world contexts, and suggest new optimization problems requiring further research.