A New Solution to the Most Complex Vehicle Routing Problems
Summary
Current methods are not capable of planning the optimal route of every single vehicle while factoring in variables like carrying capacity, time of day, fuel and staff costs, and desired windows of delivery. If routing is a difficult theoretical challenge on paper, it gets even more taxing in real life when vehicles break down, drivers get sick, and clients aren’t at home. Dating back to the 1950’s, the problem involves optimizing the routes of a fleet of vehicles to meet customer needs while factoring in related constraints and variables. These numbers hit the stratosphere when you scale to a full fleet of trucks with 40 stops each and the need to consider multiple variables such as traffic, vehicle breakdowns, weather conditions, customer preferences, peak seasons and more. Unfortunately, in order to render the computation time feasible, businesses must approximate or omit variables and rely on domain expertise, which results in solutions that are generally of medium to poor quality.