Whether you’ve got a load of errands to run around town, need to scout out a list of homes or apartments, or are planning your band’s next cross-country tour, there’s a free online tool that shows you the best route to take to save time and fuel.
Enter OptiMap from Gebweb. This handy tool helps figure out the quickest route to hit multiple stops on a trip.
Built as a mashup of Google Maps software, you simply enter a list of address you need to hit. You can also simply click on the map to set your destinations, although this may be a little less precise.
Once your destinations are set, click on the “Calculate Fastest Route” button. The site will spit back the quickest route to hit all points, including a map view and turn by turn directions for each leg of your journey. You can even choose to avoid highways, or indicate that you’ll be walking instead of driving for pedestrian-friendly routes.
From my testing, the route plans seems very accurate and I haven’t come across any weird backtracking or zig-zagging. The author does note that routes with more than 9 destinations aren’t guaranteed to be the most efficient, but most of us won’t need to map out more than that.
Geek Speak Alert: You’ll notice that the route planner is titled “TSP Solver for Google Maps.” This stands for Traveling Salesman Problem, a computer science problem that involves planning route efficiency with multiple destinations or nodes. As the number of nodes increases, the complexity of the calculations increases exponentially. Nodes numbering in the thousands could take the average computer days to solve.
TSP solutions are valuable not just in route planning, but also in microchip design, DNA sequencing, and more. Check out the Wikipedia article on TSP for more info.
Leave a comment