An open source Spreadsheet Solver for Vehicle Routing Problems

•An open source solver for the Vehicle Routing Problem is introduced.•Two case studies, from the healthcare and tourism sectors, are provided.•An exact formulation that can handle many constraints is presented.•Computational results on benchmark instances are provided. The Vehicle Routing Problem (V...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computers & operations research 2017-08, Vol.84, p.62-72
Main Author: Erdoğan, Güneş
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Constraints
Customers
Health care
Logistics
Metaheuristics
Open source software
Operations research
Route planning
Routing
Spreadsheets
Tourism
Vehicle routing
Vehicle Routing Problem
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:•An open source solver for the Vehicle Routing Problem is introduced.•Two case studies, from the healthcare and tourism sectors, are provided.•An exact formulation that can handle many constraints is presented.•Computational results on benchmark instances are provided. The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the most frequently encountered optimization problems in logistics, which aims to minimize the cost of transportation operations by a fleet of vehicles operating out of a base. This paper introduces VRP Spreadsheet Solver, an open source Excel based tool for solving many variants of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). Case studies of two real-world applications of the solver from the healthcare and tourism sectors that demonstrate its use are presented. The solution algorithm for the solver, and computational results on benchmark instances from the literature are provided. The solver is found to be capable of solving Capacitated VRP and Distance-Constrained VRP instances with up to 200 customers within 1 h of CPU time.
ISSN:0305-0548
1873-765X
0305-0548
DOI:10.1016/j.cor.2017.02.022