A heuristic for the triangulation problem

This article reports the successful implementation of a heuristic that enables a survey vessel to determine its location, in real time, on an inexpensive PC platform without recourse to satellite position fixing. The heuristic produces a solution to the classic over-constrained triangulation problem in the cartesian plane. It is demonstrated via a Monte Carlo simulation that there is no significant difference between the solutions produced by this heuristic and the solutions produced by an iterative technique based upon a minimization method. The implementation is typically more than two orders of magnitude more run-time efficient in determining locations then an implementation of the iterative technique.