Hi,

I am working on an application which needs to generate a service call route, I need to find a way to sort the addresses in the route by distance taking the main office as the start point.

Does anybody know of any tool, library, website, or whatever that would help me get this done?

Thanks!

Edhy Rijo

Hi Edhy,

Not really - there's quite a bit of stuff out there that will calculate distances between two GPS co-ordinates, e.g.

http://www.abe.msstate.edu/Tools/Calculator/gps.php

I guess you want address to address distances so your starting point has to be a 'map' that has the co-ordinates of your stree names.

This site has links that may help:

http://www.gmat.unsw.edu.au/snap/gps/gps_links.htm

Don't forget - the travelling saleman problem says tell us a 'good enough solution' is to simply head to the next nearest point.

Cheers, Peter

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the links info, I will check them out.

Basically we have all address destination and the starting point is the main office, I am looking for a tool that will accept a bunch of addresses and based on the starting point organize the order of each address so the driver will go to the closest one first and from that one the next closer to the first and so on.

Right now, I am simply ordering the report by address, but that is not enough.

Edhy Rijo

I used this web service in an app recently, but zip codes was all I needed to know. If you have to get more defined as in street addresses within a city it wont work. I was looking for the closest retail outlet of one of my customers within a multi state area. I did mess with the free Google maps SDK and was going to use it until I found this servive, that fit my particular need.

http://codebump.com/services/zipcodelookup.asmx?op=GetDistanceBetweenZipCodes

Keith Chisarik

Thanks Keith, it is good to know about this one too.

Edhy Rijo

All good stuff...one other suggestion that we have used is MelissaData (http://www.melissadata.com/) which has a number of databases including ZIPs, GPS locations, etc.  They also have some SDKs and tools that may be worth looking at.