[GRASS-user] traveling salesman problem in air

[Moritz Lennert]

On 15/04/09 09:19, Wolf Bergenheim wrote:
> On 15.04.2009 10:05, Moritz Lennert wrote:
>> On 15/04/09 08:55, Martina Schäfer wrote:
>>> Dear GRASS experts!
>>> I encountered an interesting problem and am curious about solutions.
>>> A helicopter company has got a file from a client regarding a forest
>>> inventory. The file contains 1430 polygons representing areas to be
>>> visited. Now we want to calculate the optimal route to visit all
>>> polygons. In contrast to a traveling salesman , we don't have a
>>> network of routes as the helicopter can fly everywhere. Would it be a
>>> solution to have the distance betweeen areas as the "cost"?
>>> I used a tool in MapInfo that connects successive closest points which
>>> worked very nice but not optimal.
>>> Anyone knows of other solutions?
>> Maybe v.net.visibility to create a network and then v.net.salesman ?
> 
> Exactly what I was going to suggest. the network created by
> v.net.visibility will connect all polygon nodes to all visible polygon
> nodes. The net will then consist of of these points plus the edges that
> make up the polygons.

Depending on the size of the polygons and of the whole area, I imagine 
that this could be simplified by just using the centroids of the 
polygons, or ?

Moritz