Approaching (Many) Vehicle Routing Problems

Preface

Note: this is my hobby work in progress.

My experience with Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) dated back to my Ph.D. years when I designed and implemented algorithms to solve the Consistent Vehicle Routing Problem (ConVRP), a variant of the Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (PVRP) with application in the home healthcare industry. Since routing optimization is ubiquitous in supply chain domain, I’ve also solved various VRP variants since I started working in industry.

VRP is a classical optimization problem in Operations Research (OR) and there are many solution approaches to attack this problem, mostly depending on the complexity and/or the scale of the problem at hand. In this book (notebook), I intend to document the various approaches to (effectively) solve VRPs. Consider them my secrect sauces for routing optimization.

All the algorithms will be implemented in Java, which is my language of choice when implementing optimization algorithms. Although I also use Python extensively in other areas of data scicen work, machine learning in particular, it is too slow to build efficient algorithms that are time-critical.