Good questions, dragonchild. Thank you for being alert, and reminding me that I can never define my problems as well as I think I can ... :-)

To (hopefully) answer:

I have more (or the same number of) locations than people. We (hopefully) wouldn't book more sales calls than we have sales people for a given day. Therefore, I guess this might equate to your flight crew situation, where M>=X.

I think I want to minimise the mean distance. (I guess the sales team won't be happy with one poor guy having to travel the length of the country, even if the overall distance travelled for the whole group is less.)

Presumably this latter item will be defined in my scoring/fitness routine - whether the score is per individual or for the whole group. Incidentally, it did occur to me that my "score" might not simply be the distance travelled (lower being obviously better). Perhaps I could consider returning the distance travelled squared, so that greater distances get penalised even more? (e.g. two reps travelling 50 miles each is better than one travelling 25 miles and one travelling 75.) I get a nagging feeling that this "off-the-top-of-my-head" solution may be troublesome, however. Perhaps instead I might introduce a large penalty if the distance travelled for one individual exceeds a certain threshold? Any thoughts?

To be honest, I was envisaging trying to get the core routine working, and then "playing" with the scoring routine later. (After, for example, I run it, and find one rep travelling the length of the country. :-D)

I hope this explains things a little better.

SmugX

In reply to Re^2: Efficient Assignment of Many People To Many Locations? by SmugX
in thread Efficient Assignment of Many People To Many Locations? by SmugX

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.