Chapter 15. What is OptaWeb Vehicle Routing?

The main purpose of many businesses is to transport various types of cargo. The goal of these businesses is to deliver a piece of cargo from the loading point to a destination and use its vehicle fleet in the most efficient way. One of the main objectives is to minimize travel costs which are measured in either time or distance.

This type of optimization problem is referred to as the vehicle routing problem (VRP) and has many variations.

Red Hat Build of OptaPlanner can solve many of these vehicle routing variations and provides solution examples. OptaPlanner enables developers to focus on modeling business rules and requirements instead of learning constraint programming theory. OptaWeb Vehicle Routing expands the vehicle routing capabilities of OptaPlanner by providing a starter application that answers questions such as these:

OptaWeb Vehicle Routing uses OpenStreetMap (OSM) data files. For information about OpenStreetMap, see the OpenStreetMap web site.

Use the following definitions when working with OptaWeb Vehicle Routing:

Region: An arbitrary area on the map of Earth, represented by an OSM file. A region can be a country, a city, a continent, or a group of countries that are frequently used together. For example, the DACH region includes Germany (DE), Austria (AT), and Switzerland (CH).

Country code: A two-letter code assigned to a country by the ISO-3166 standard. You can use a country code to filter geosearch results. Because you can work with a region that spans multiple countries (for example, the DACH region), OptaWeb Vehicle Routing accepts a list of country codes so that geosearch filtering can be used with such regions. For a list of country codes, see ISO 3166 Country Codes

Geosearch: A type of query where you provide an address or a place name of a region as the search keyword and receive a number of GPS locations as a result. The number of locations returned depends on how unique the search keyword is. Because most place names are not unique, filter out nonrelevant results by including only places in the country or countries that are in your working region.