Best Path BonArea

Inspiration

We were inspired by the nature of the problem, due to the fact that, at first thought, it was a very entertaining pathfinding challenge, and it would give us a lot of freedom in terms of different approaches to achieving a correct solution.

What it does

In the backend, it reads all the information provided and computes the shortest routes for getting a list of items from the store, it then returns all this information into a .csv file that can be read with some scripts that represent the data visually and providing useful insight on the path that it's taking, the time it takes...

How we built it

We took inspiration of a famous unsolved computation problem called Travelling Salesman Problem, we tried recreating one of the algorithms that returns the shortest path with 100% certainty at a cost of O(2^n)

Challenges we ran into

Due to the fact that the cost is exponential, the algorithm takes a long time for long combinations of items, to circumvent that we wanted to separate the problem into smaller more manageable problems that would give us a balance between a good path and a reasonable execution time

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to complete all the frontend challenges and we managed to read and store all the data provided to manage the inputs, we also were able to make an NP algorithm that computed the best path with 100% certainty for item combinations that did not exceed 10 or more items.

What we learned

We learned how to use javascript, html, and css, we learned how to display information from the given inputs, we managed to find a clever solution for an implementation for a well known unsolved problem in the world of computation and we managed to adapt it to fit our needs, while learning about pathfinding algorithms along the way.

What's next for Best Path BonArea

If we had more time we would look deeper into how to perfecte the algorithm, make it functional and, therefore, make it usable in real scenarions, we didn't have time to implement the segmentation of the problem, if we had had enough time, and with enough work, we would have gotten an algorithm that computes a nearly perfect path with minimal execution time.