Seems to be high season for project ideas :-) . Here's one from me:
An open source implementation of a solution to the dynamic job shop
scheduling problem (DJSSP). Don't be misled into thinking this only applies
to production planning in manufacturing industries. Thats the classical case
for which much research has been done (surprisingly most research only
covers the JSSP - a 'D" before that is considered one of the hardest of NP
hard problems). Modern applications for this will be BPOs (eg. allocating
froms to be processed to people). It applies to any situation where a set of
jobs are to be allocated to a finite set of resources.
Since it is an NP hard problem, there is no point in trying to find the most
optimal solution. Instead, the focus is to find good enough 'feasible'
solutions. The prevailing view is that genetic algorithms are well suited
for these kinds of problems. There are a few articles about this on the web
but no implementations. So, if you can do this, it can get you academic,
industry as well as hacker recognition.
regds,
mano
--
War is not about who's right..... its about who's left!
