The traveling salesman problem and its application to car sharing services

Abstract

With a rapidly growing population across the globe and the ease of car ownership, the challenges of the individual transport vehicles is showing every day. Individual transport vehicles not only cause a lack of space, but they also produce air, noise and visual pollution. A soluction to the problem of city road saturation is car sharing. The purpose of the thesis is to explain the possible application of algorithms to transportation sharing services and its benefits. This research covers the history, evolution and derivations of these pathfinding algorithms. The objectives have been achieved through an extensive research on both pathfinding problems and algorithms. Some of the documents consulted were from the early 20th century, which provide an overview of the evolution of the pathfinding problems. The result is a comprehensive analysis on pathfinding algorithms and the derivations of the Traveling Salesman Problem. The reader will have a better understanding of the subject even with very little knowledge on programming. The thesis serves as an introduction to pathfinding problems for new programmers. With very basic programming skills, any reader will be able to replicate the algorithms explained in the thesis.