Optimize Aptive Technician Route | Dataford Interview Questions

Aptive Environmental wants to optimize a simplified technician schedule for a single day. Given travel times between stops, implement a function that returns the minimum total travel cost to start at the Aptive branch, visit every assigned stop exactly once, and return to the branch.

Formal Specification

Write a function optimize_aptive_route(travel_times) where:

travel_times is an n x n matrix of non-negative integers
travel_times[i][j] is the cost to travel from stop i to stop j
stop 0 is the Aptive branch (start and end)
the function returns an integer: the minimum possible total route cost

If travel_times is empty, return 0. If the matrix is not square, contains negative values, or has inconsistent row lengths, raise ValueError.

Constraints

0 <= n <= 12
travel_times is an n x n matrix
0 <= travel_times[i][j] <= 10^6 for valid inputs
Stop 0 is the Aptive branch and must be the start and end
The matrix may be asymmetric

Function Signature

def optimize_aptive_route(travel_times):

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