Ooh, no, I'm not being quite that complicated!

For the purposes of my problem, we can forget about times. Let's assume that each sales rep only has one call per day. My problem is merely about the best geographical assignment.

Cost of travel is tricky - althought nowhere near as tricky as in your situation. Most reps will hopefully not be travelling that far (if I can get this algorithm right!!!) and all will be travelling by car: hence, no plane scheduling problems, and no allowing for travelling by planes, trains or automobiles as appropriate.

Hence, I've boiled the scoring mechanism down to simply one of distance. (I'd love a way of estimating time to travel, because of course 50 miles up a motorway is slightly different to 50 miles straight across a town centre. However, whilst I'd love any help on this (I'm in the UK, if you're going to suggest any route-finding services), this is definitely out-of-scope for my original problem.)

Thanks again,
SmugX.


In reply to Re^4: 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.