Solving the Vehicle Routing Problem In the Open-Source Software ‘ODL Studio’

Abstract

Transport management is one of the most important logistical tasks, and the designing the optimal transport routes plays a major role in that process. Vehicle routing is primarily of interest to companies that organize the transportation of goods to end users, with the aim of minimizing the total cost of the routes. Being a well-known NP-hard problem, the theoretical background of the vehicle routing problem has been researched for many years and it has been the basis for the development of a large number of commercial software. However, affordable software solutions are lacking. Difficult access to high quality and reliable spatial data related to the road network is also a limitation. This paper discusses the possibilities of applying open-source software for solving the VRP. Open spatial data from a collaborative project of the virtual community was used as the basis for modeling the road network graph. The experiment was carried out on data on vehicles and customers of a certain retail chain and refers to the territory of Serbia.