Big Jim plows snow for five residential customers in northern New Hampshire. Placing a Cartesian coordinate system on a map of his service area, with his home at the origin (A), Big Jim located his five customers at coordinates: B (10, 40); C (22, 20); D (35, 37); E (40, 25); F (50, 40). He has two ways to measure distances between his customers: Euclidian and rectilinear (Chapter 3, “Process Strategy” and the section on layouts for the definitions of these measures). He is wondering if his method of measuring distances will affect the sequence of customer locations he must visit to minimize his energy costs.
a. Use the Nearest Neighbor heuristic to locate the best route for Big Jim, assuming that he is interested in minimizing Euclidean distances.
b. Use the Nearest Neighbor heuristic to locate the best route for Big Jim, assuming that he is interested in minimizing rectilinear distances.