Pigeon

Inspiration

We drew our inspiration from the current inefficiencies that lie in today's parcel delivery. Every extra mileage of gas is increasingly detrimental to the environment, and we see billions of parcels being delivered every single day. As this number continues to increase, the threat on the environment only becomes more relevant. We believe we can reduce this waste in time and resources by using optimisation algorithm that minimize the route lengths that delivery vehicles must travel.

What it does

Our project uses real world road data to model the delivery of a parcel before it even enters a delivery vehicle. By utilizing a variety of optimization algorithms, our project determines order routes that limit the distance in which delivery vehicles must travel. Along with strategizing delivery based on the number of available vehicles, our project considers clusters of close deliveries to limit any travel without frequent delivery. We then determine the order in which items should be delivered to minimize the travel distance of each vehicle. These deliveries routes are then modeled using Python on top of real world roads.

How we built it

We built the majority of our project using Python alongside pygame for visualisation. We used open street view to obtain real world road data.

Challenges we ran into

One of the major challenges we faced was determining how we could model our algorithms on top of real world roads. Alongside our algorithms, we had to consider how each delivery could be reached based on the layout of a city's road systems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we are proud of our final project and the work we put into it! Throughout this hackathon, we all worked really hard to make the most of our current skillset while learning new development skills to produce a project that we could be proud of!

What we learned

One of the major things we learned in this hackathon is the true complexity of delivery routing. This project has given me newfound appreciation for the work done by many postal services, and I hope to explore this field further in the future.