The field of problem solving that Fedex applies to routing packages is called operations research. As you may have noticed, this discipline can be used by companies with simple business models that want to improve efficiency or reduce risk. A good place to start would be the Wikipedia article.
Thanks but I am really interested in reading more about NP hardness in real world situations. Operations research may be a place to start but then my question becomes "Where does NP hardness arise in operations research?"
Here's an example of a creative way to interpret my original question: as xkcd implies, you might say eBay "solves" an NP hard problem http://xkcd.com/399/. Ebay doesn't solve the traveling salesman problem as it is normally posed in computer science, but it rephrased the problem statement in a useful way.
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The field of problem solving that Fedex applies to routing packages is called operations research. As you may have noticed, this discipline can be used by companies with simple business models that want to improve efficiency or reduce risk. A good place to start would be the Wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research
Thanks but I am really interested in reading more about NP hardness in real world situations. Operations research may be a place to start but then my question becomes "Where does NP hardness arise in operations research?"
Here's an example of a creative way to interpret my original question: as xkcd implies, you might say eBay "solves" an NP hard problem http://xkcd.com/399/. Ebay doesn't solve the traveling salesman problem as it is normally posed in computer science, but it rephrased the problem statement in a useful way.