Shop&Go: The Routing Problem Applied to the Shopping List on Smartphones

Abstract

Mobile applications have achieved a great development in the past years. Some of the existing tools are useful for carrying out daily tasks. In this regard, we propose in this paper a mobile application, called Shop&Go, to do the shopping in a supermarket covering the shortest distance. This kind of problems is a classic paradigm from the field of operational research. We propose two heuristics to obtain the optimum path to do the shopping. The distances and the products layout are obtained from a map previously provided by the supermarket. We have compared both heuristics, proving that any of them can achieve the best solution depending on which products are in the shopping list. Therefore, we have decided to include both algorithms in our tool, leaving to the user the decision of which of the solution paths to take. The application has also other functional requirements which are described in the paper. Simulations of how the tool is working over an HTC Desire mobile are shown. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.