By
@28taidan
Weekly logistics planner for families. It helps manage logistics for families that have to manage driving their kids around to different extracurriculars all the time.
The Family Plan helps manage logistics for families that have to manage driving their kids around to different extracurriculars all the time. Just put in when drivers are available, and when and where kids need to be, and it calculates the most optimal plan to get everyone where they need to be with as little time in the car as possible.
I was inspired to make this project because my mom spends hours every weekend trying to come up with a plan for how to get me and my siblings to all of our various after school activities. I made this to try to simplify and speed up the process, and also include the rest of the family in that process (since they can simply put in when they are available and when they need to be picked up/dropped off).
Something that was challenging was figuring out how to get the most optimal plan. I knew that it would involve getting people to spend the least amount of time in the car (adjusting for tiers, or how important a person’s time is), but it was complicated to figure out how to do that. The key realization was that you can’t decide who carpools by looking at directions on a map. Two kids heading “opposite” ways might still share a ride if one stop is on the road to the other. So instead the app asks a routing engine for real drive times and pools rides whenever the extra driving is small enough to be worth it. This breaks slightly whenever the destinations don’t have an address (since the engine I use for that, OSRM, is incomplete), since then it doesn’t have drive times. However, it works well enough for now. To use, just go to the website (hosted on Vercel), and create a new family. Add some drivers and kids, and play around with the routing system. Hopefully this is useful!
4h 46m 20s logged
Finished the planning logic, and some final bug fixes before shipping. The planning works by assigning tiers to each person, which prioritizes their time over other people’s time. So in case like someone really doesn’t like driving people around, you can give them a high tier and it will try to protect their time more. It then runs through all the possible plans (which is really inefficient but works, since there’s not too many possible plans), to find one that works well. I also did some bug fixes, cleaning up the UI and other things from the fixes. Some things I still might add in the future are allowing people to integrate their calendars, email/text all the per person weekly plans to people directly instead of just downloading the images, and better tracking for where each driver is (it assumes the driver starts from home, but this is unrealistic, since the driver probably goes to work or something in the middle of the day. But they wouldn’t put that in the plan, since it doesn’t have anything to do with driving their kid around), so I might try to find out how to fix that. But I want to ship it first to get feedback on the core process.
2h 13m 32s logged
Working on UX improvements!
I fixed a bunch of bugs, for example overlapping events saying “I’m available” are combined into one, for simplicity. The idea is that each person goes in to put in their availability, so I made it that you choose a person and edit only their location/availability, so they don’t have to see stuff that’s not relevant to them (it gets greyed out).
Next, I am working on the core of the project, the planning logic. The idea is to build an algorithm to find the lowest amount of total hours everyone. I think I’d probably need some kind of greedy algorithm, but I’m not sure yet.
1h 55m 28s logged
I did some UI improvements and bug fixes to putting down a kid’s dropoff/pickup time, and also added location data to each dropoff/pickup point using Photon and OSRM, so I can estimate the travel time and when the kid has to leave to get there on time.
51m 34s logged
Setting up a basic calendar view, as well as Vercel. I’m using Vercel’s Neon for storage because of it’s great free tier.
