Group travel cost function. Add total flight time as a cost equal to $0.50 per minute on the plane. Next try adding a penalty of $20 for making anyone get to the airport before 8 a.m.

Annealing starting points. The outcome of simulated annealing depends heavily on the starting point. Build a new optimization function that does simulated annealing from multiple starting solutions and returns the best one.

Genetic optimization stopping criteria. A function in this chapter runs the genetic optimizer for a fixed number of iterations. Change it so that it stops when there has been no improvement in any of the best solutions for 10 iterations.