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Pavan Manjunath
Pavan Manjunath

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Graph Theory in Real Life: How BFS Solves Business Problems You Didn’t Know Existed

🧠 Introduction

-> Ever wondered how your team organizes tasks, routes delivery packages, or prioritizes bug reports? Beneath the surface, you're living in a graph.

-> Introduce graphs quickly, mention your focus on 1-based indexing, BFS, and how you initially visualized traversal logic.

🧱 How to brick ideas and find in real life.

I work in logistics domain run many warehouses. Each connected node in your graph represents a department: receiving, packaging, quality check, dispatch… and BFS is the method to check each floor in sequence without getting lost

Below is the code just refer and link to your ideas.

how i store graph as .Net developer: C# adjacency list

Adjacency list

BFS traversal algorithm:
Simple explaination:

  • create a function with accepts startNode, adjacency list
  • take queue put startNode, and make that to true in bool array
  • now keep on iterating queue until its empty
  • go through each neighbour and check if its visited or not, if its not then make it true in bool array, enqueue it.
  • pick enqueue item and start step 4.

Main

BFS traversal

💼 Business Use Case Callout

📦 BFS in Action: Real-World Usage
Warehouse routing, customer support escalation paths, or even job interview scheduling — all can be modeled as graphs. And understanding how BFS traverses these structures helps you optimize them.

💡 Final Reflection

I loved building this small C# BFS tool — not just to crack LeetCode, but to see how it mirrors so many real-world workflows.
How do you mentally map your own work or team’s flow? Do you see graphs in your day-to-day challenges — and are you using them to your advantage?

Regards,
Pavan

Top comments (1)

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Mounir Mouawad

Love this buddy. The insight of "Beneath the surface, you're living in a graph" is a big part of what drove of our design of the Portia SDK to include planning and execution separately. Hope you manage to give us a try (and a star ;) and share your thoughts with us!