Friday, June 14, 2013

UPS' new tool to deliver packages faster

At UPS, the average driver makes about 120 deliveries per day, according to Jack Levis, the shipping giant's director of process management. To figure out how many different possible routes that driver could travel takes an immense number of calculations, and that number becomes astronomical when ciphered for up to 55,000 UPS drivers each day.

Over the next five years, UPS will roll out an exacting algorithm designed to steer drivers away from routine paths and toward routes that are sometimes counterintuitive in order to make each delivery faster.

Called ORION, or On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation, UPS' data-rich route optimization tool is designed to deliver the best answer yet to the traveling salesman problem, the classic computational conundrum that shows just how hard it is to find the shortest distance among a series of points on a map.

Due to the size of the numbers involved, ORION depends on wikipedia.org/computer_science heuristics, the field of math and computer science devoted to finding answers that are good enough, and that get better based on past experience.

For more of the Wired story: wired.com

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