Tehnika (Jan 2018)
Designing optimal transport routes using open-source software
Abstract
Vehicle routing plays a major role in the industry, primarily in companies that organize the transport of goods to end-users. The theoretical background of the vehicle routing problem has been known for many years and it has been the basis for developing a lot of commercial software solutions. However, in practice, there is a barrier in the form of the lack of affordable software solutions. The difficult access to quality and reliable spatial data relating to the road network is also a limitation. This paper looks into the possibilities of applying open source software to solve this NP-difficult problem. The free spatial data from OpenStreetMap, a joint project of the virtual community, was used as a basis for modeling the graph of the road network. The experiment was carried out over the data on vehicles and users of the specific retail chain and relates to the territory of Serbia.
