[116010] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Shortest path to the world
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Donelan)
Thu Jul 16 02:07:34 2009
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:07:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <20090716030613.GA37362@ussenterprise.ufp.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Wed, 15 Jul 2009, Leo Bicknell wrote:
> Quite frankly, your question reminds me a bit of the geography
> question "where is the center of the US".
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_center_of_the_contiguous_United_States
> While nifty trivia, it acutally has no useful value for well,
> anything. If it did, there would be more there than a small monument.
Unless you were Federal Express, and wanted to understand where the
"center" of your service area was to help pick better airport hub
locations. Add in some offsets for time zones, weather, and even more
complexity and your hub ends up in Memphis. Optimal can sometimes mean
its good enough, even the momument at the center of the United States
isn't actually located at the precise center.
http://ardent.mit.edu/airports/ASP_exercises/ASP%20matl%20for%20posting%202007/UPS%20and%20FedEx%20Hub%20Operations%20Cosmas%20Martini.pdf
Operations research is filled with people trying to figure out the optimal
number of hubs, hub locations, routes between them for all sorts of stuff.
So where are the operations research people studying the Internet?
