Bringing Pizza Delivery to the Operational Research Classroom

Introduction Although it is common for operational research (O.R.) professors to try to bring real-world examples and applications to the O.R. classroom, typically, undergraduate students do not take what they learn in class and immediately apply it to real-world problems. In this paper, we consider an exception to that rule. Specifically, we will discuss how one undergraduate O.R. student took what he learned about the traveling salesperson problem (TSP) and used it to improve his pizza delivery performance. In fact, he went beyond the classroom discussion and incorporated in his problem formulation and solution approach, both distance traveled and time required for the pizza delivery. In the next section, we will give background on the problem the student wanted to solve followed by his solution approach and results.