Designing Vehicle Routing Software

Fleet management tools with route optimization functionality have been available on the market for many years. The savings potential is high. Yet, such tools have been deployed in industry only to a rather limited degree. There are a number of reasons. Most of them are not touched upon in the scientific VRP literature. Designing vehicle routing software is a difficult task. One needs to balance a number of partially conflicting concerns. To address a broad application market, the underlying VRP model must be rich and flexible. The corresponding resolution algorithms need to be robust and scalable. The code should be efficient, but also readable, extendible, and maintainable. Excellent user interfaces, including several types of plan visualizers and facilities for mixed-initiative planning, are crucial. Narrow, configurable, and general interfaces to systems for order handling, mobile communication, and electronic road and address data are vital components. Effective and efficient mechanisms for configuring and re-configuring the tool to a given application may significantly reduce implementation costs. This talk will address and illustrate several issues related with the design of vehicle routing software.

Geir Hasle received his Ph.D. on Knowledge-Based Factory Scheduling from the University of Oslo in 1996. He has been the Research Director of the Department of Optimization at SINTEF Applied Mathematics since its foundation in 1997, and Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo since 2001. Dr. Hasle initiated and was the Technical Manager of the GreenTrip European research project that produced scientific results in vehicle routing as well as prototypes of routing software. He is member of the board of GreenTrip AS, a Norwegian vendor of transportation optimization technology. Geir Hasle is the manager of TOP, an ongoing, 4-year strategic research program in transportation optimization funded by the Research Council of Norway.