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EdisonCruise
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What's the optimal strategy to this food transportation problem?

June 1st, 2019, 10:21 am

The distance between city A and B  is 100 km. The total food needs to move from A to B is 3 tons. A transportation team can carry food 1 ton per day and at the same time consumes food 0.25 tons per day. Then how to setup transfer stations between city A nd B to minimize food consumption during transportation?

This seem to be a classical dynamic programming problem, is there any general solution?
 
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tw
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Re: What's the optimal strategy to this food transportation problem?

June 4th, 2019, 9:52 am

cf. The Jeep problem (it's somewhere in Bellman's 1950s book but googling should find some references).
 
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Re: What's the optimal strategy to this food transportation problem?

June 10th, 2019, 10:21 pm

do not transport the food, then when people in city B gets hungry enough thy will transport fresh meat to city A for free! Don't blame me, it is a solution I got from my new AI solver.
 
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ISayMoo
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Re: What's the optimal strategy to this food transportation problem?

June 15th, 2019, 8:03 pm

The distance between city A and B  is 100 km. The total food needs to move from A to B is 3 tons. A transportation team can carry food 1 ton per day and at the same time consumes food 0.25 tons per day. Then how to setup transfer stations between city A nd B to minimize food consumption during transportation?

This seem to be a classical dynamic programming problem, is there any general solution?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Ball_Express