When traveling on the surface of the Earth one cannot take a constant heading to travel the shortest route from point A to B.
Instead, the heading must be constantly readjusted so that the arc of the trajectory corresponds to the intersection between the globe and a plane that passes through the center of the Earth.
For ships the ocean currents are an important factor which can be harnessed to produce the optimal path.
- This app generates a Graph with the (latitude, longitude) grid of ocean points around the globe as vertices.
- Edges are the 8-point ocean neighbours with weights being the time taken by the ship to travel the length of the edge considering the Ocean Currents.
- This app generates an optimal route for a ship by running Dijkstra's Shortest Path Algorithm on this graph with the Start and End points taken as inputs.