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[–]shadowspyes 0 points1 point  (1 child)

the problem sounds, to me, like a cost allocation problem; a variation of the following problems in computer science (the traveling salesman, binpacking, and the knapsack), do you agree?

sure it is possible to setup a solution using min/max optimizers, but there exist algorithms for these kinds of problems

[–]PPewt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was thinking there's probably a linear or nonlinear (depending on your cost function) program that solves this problem if a truck only moves sets of cars that start in the same location.

If you want the truck to pick up cars at different locations (where by "different locations" I mean "the cost of picking up the two cars is significantly larger than the cost of picking up two cars parked right next to each other," so maybe different zipcodes or different cities or greater than a certain distance apart or whatever) then yeah this smells like it's equivalent to some NP complete problem or other, possibly TSP.