How I Built It: Route planning — The “Traveling Salesman Problem”
This ‘How I Built It’ video presents an Anaplan model that simulates a simplified “Traveling Salesman Problem” by using a fixed set of five cities and generating all possible route combinations. Users input a list of cities, and the model systematically builds every possible sequence of travel to ensure that all routes are evaluated.
After generating these combinations, the model calculates the distance for each route using built-in Anaplan Polaris functions. Trigonometric functions such as TORADIANS(), SIN(), COS(), and ACOS() enable distance calculations based on latitude and longitude, allowing the model to dynamically compute distances between each pair of cities. The total distance for each route is then summed across all legs of the journey, producing a single value that represents the full travel path. Repeating this process across all routes creates a complete set of comparable route distances.
The key takeaway is that the model shows how Anaplan can handle complex optimization problems using native functionality, combining list-driven structures with formula-based calculations. The design is also relatively scalable, as additional cities can be included by extending lists and line items, although the number of combinations increases rapidly. More broadly, this approach highlights how Anaplan can support analytical use cases such as route optimization, scenario evaluation, and decision support without requiring external tools or exporting data to separate models to leverage Optimizer.
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All 'How I Built It' tutorials can be viewed here.
