Ortec will come by to give a lunch lecture!

Dijkstra’s is a cool algorithm which is still pretty much state of the art when calculating shortest paths in general graphs. It’s pretty fast too: almost linear in the number of edges. Sometimes, this is still too slow though! If your road network is very big (the world has hundreds of millions of ‘edges’) and you want many millions of routes, waiting a couple of seconds for each one is not nice. ORTEC is a Dutch company that – among many other things – makes software that optimizes routes for trucking and package delivery companies. They use a clever algorithm called Customizable Route Planning that can outperform classic Dijkstra’s by a factor of 1000x.