Vehicle Routing

This project is an experimental environment for testing different optimisation libraries on the vehicle routing problem. The following libraries are used in this project

• Optaplanner
• Google's or-tools

Guide

The project was initially set up to experiment with Optaplanner and later expanded to compare against other libraries. The first alternate library that is supported is Or-tools. In the modelling the Optaplanner models are re-used extensively, which means that Or-tools is accessed via these models. The adapters OptaplannerToOrToolsAdapter and OrtoolsToOptaplannerAdapter translate the model in and out.

Although the implementations only supports problems that are capacitated and time-windowed, the project is easily extendable to other vrp flavours. This is done under the guise of different problem-types. A problem-type is an arbitrary name for a certain vehicle routing problem, e.g. a CVRPTW from Solomon, or a CVRPTW from Gehring & Homberger. Currently, only problems of type CVRPTW are supported and this is called SINTEF in this project (from where the data is sourced). This name is rather arbitrary and may change in the future. Other flavours of the VRP are not supported yet.

To implement your own flavour refer to the SintefVehicleRoutingSolution and the Optaplanner vrp implementation

Dependencies

Optaplanner

Optaplanner is loaded as a dependency using maven.

Or-tools

Or-tools is not available in the maven repository. Therefore to run or-tools one needs to download the library from here. Place the google-ortools jar in the following folder: /src/main/resources/lib/com.google.ortools.jar (or adjust the pom.xml accordingly.)

Note that on Windows the Visual Studio C++ redistributable needs to be installed for it to work.

Program arguments

The program supports the following program arguments:

• -run-mode or -m. The mode to run the solver in. Accepts optaplanner, or-tools or benchmark.
• -problem-type or -p. The problem type to solve. Currently only supports the SINTEF problem. See here
• -file-path or -f. The path for the problem to solve.
• -runtimeInMinutes or -rt. The runtime in minutes for the problem.

How to run a single problem

Optaplanner

mvn clean install exec:java -Dexec.args="-m optaplanner -p SINTEF -runtimeInMinutes 1 -f input/sintef/homberger_1000_customer_instances/C1_10_2.TXT"

Or-tools

mvn clean install exec:java -Dexec.args="-m or-tools -p SINTEF -runtimeInMinutes 1 -f input/sintef/homberger_1000_customer_instances/C1_10_2.TXT"

How to run the benchmark

Benchmarker

The functionality to run the same problem set against different libraries can be accessed via the following command. mvn clean install exec:java -Dexec.args="-m benchmark -p SINTEF -runtimeInMinutes 1 -f input/sintef/homberger_1000_customer_instances/ -o output.csv"