de tomKronieken

During my college studies, I've seen many algorithms of which I thought "Hmm, nicely done, but will it ever have any practical value in the rest of my life?" Dijkstra's graph coloring algorithm was one of them.

Now, I'm working on a supply chain planning project. And one of the things I have to check is "We have a number of facilities with delivery lanes between them. We have to take care that no closed loops are created between those facilities." Up came Dijkstra's graph coloring algorithm (to my utter astonishment).

Lessons learnt:

• it never hurts to learn lessons
• it's hard to find a link explaining Dijkstra's graph coloring algorithm. I'm even doubting now that it was Dijkstra's. If you know a page where the closed-loop detection algorithm is described, feel free to send it to me (I've got it on hardcopy, but I'm not going to type that over ;) ).