BootsnAll Travel Community

does anyone know of anywhere on the web where you can plot a journey on the map to try to figure out the best route to take--i was gonna do this by hand but its just easier on the computer--can u help me out?

I know u can pick cities and see alist of a way to go but i would quite like to see the wee line all joined up for where i'm gonna go. (childish i know)

Define "best"

And check out Mappy and Map 24.

best=shortest/cheapest

i want a world map where i can input the places i want to visit and it shows the best(see above) way to go about seeing them all. Whether its when to fly or take bus/train. How far it is estimated cost

I know it would probably take a super-computer to work it all out and that it probably aint available on the web but just thought i'd ask if anyone had seen anything like it just in case. (i know i'm trying to take the lazy way out of it and i should try to figure it out myself--and that's probably half the fun but it's a nice idea to have something like this)

For me, half of travel involves the planning.

The other half involves Immodium.

quote:

Originally posted by brugal:
best=shortest/cheapest

i want a world map where i can input the places i want to visit and it shows the best(see above) way to go about seeing them all. Whether its when to fly or take bus/train. How far it is estimated cost

What you are looking for is an application of the "travelling salesman problem". Try google for more info.

"The traveling salesman problem, or TSP for short, is this: given a finite number of "cities" along with the cost of travel between each pair of them, find the cheapest way of visiting all the cities and returning to your starting point."
http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/

It looks easy, but it's quite difficult to find the best route actually.

For a course I once took, I plotted a route through italy, visiting 10 cities in 14 days. I tried to minimize the travelled distance and I also included other restrictions like not visiting a city more than once, no more than 500 km of travelling each day. I used the "branch and bound technique" for this. Basically, a computer program tries all the different combinations and shows you the best one. It took my computer more than 2,5 hours to calculate. I used a software program (but I forgot the url). It's quite a lot of work, because I had to make some kind of distance chart, showing the distance from one city to every other city. This table, or distance chart can be anything you want. I took km, to minimize the distance. But you could use the cost of travelling between the two nodes, or time.

For this distance chart, you could even make up your own formula in wich you calculate a number that is a combination of time, money and distance. For example travelling "2000 km in 10 hours for $200", is this better than "2200km in 5 hours for $550" ? Depends on what you prefer: time or money...

Let me know if it works out!

some useful website, where you can download applications:
http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/
http://www.pcug.org.au/~dakin/tsp.htm
http://www.ing.unlp.edu.ar/cetad/mos/TSPBIB_home.html

You mean..like the route maps I am using on my website now -

go to www.circusoflife.com

Check the - Where Have I Been - link. Here it is:

http://www.circusoflife.com/Directions/Timelines/RouteMap_RTW.htm

Leave me a comment in my guestbook while you're at it. It's feeling a little lonely...though I have been in hibernation until recently.

I also know about the Great Circle Mapper.
You can plot points based on airport 3-letter codes. Pretty cool. Calculates distance. If you want the link let me know -- I'll dig it up.

Useful for figuring out RTW when you get distance limitations. Though I didn't know about the tool until after I took my RTW trip. Maybe the next one....

My travellign buddy and I went to great lengths to get and idea of where we were going, how long it would take and how much it would cost. We got it planned out pretty well.

Of course, once you get abroad, it all goes out the window. We found that not only had the references we'd used been mostly wrong (Lonely Planet Eastern Europe is crap), but, more importantly, we didn't want to follow our plan. On paper we'd made an awesome trip, however, in the real world there were better trips that could be made on the fly.

I'm pretty sure this problem is solved by making a netlist of the places you can go. I don't know the algorithm to apply after the netlist is created to find a route though.

(Lightbulb goes on)...

If there is really a lot of demand around here for a program that does this kind of thing, I could probably code it next year as a senior design project.

Cheech

that would be a pretty handy programme

programs like that already exist. The only problem is you need to enter all the data, that takes up most of the work But go for it anyway cheecho, a custom made program for travellers would be nice

Thanks i'll try all the website and let you know how i get on. A custom made bootsnall program would be brill!