Re:The software routing 260,000 grocery deliveries a week
by michaelt on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @02:07PM
(#15020736)
There are a few commercial options available, with different levels of complexity, performance and price. Depends on whether you need to support multiple vehicles with several deliveries on each, specific delivery time windows, and things like that.
For example, Oracle sell a product called 'Real Time Scheduler' [1]. Google finds me a bunch of other products too, but I haven't looked at them in depth.
The off-the-shelf software can deal with tens to low hundreds of orders per solution, - which can scale reasonably well if you're willing to divide your service area with boundaries you can't optimise across.
Ocado built a custom system which can support more orders with fewer boundaries; this offers better routing efficiency, which is important as delivery efficiency is a key cost driver. If your business does something like, say, washing machine repair your time-per-customer might be dominated by repair time rather than travel time; in that case you might be able to operate a nationwide business on off-the-shelf software.
The underlying algorithm in Ocado's system is based on simulated annealing [2] - although those precise words don't seem to have made it into the article!
For example, Oracle sell a product called 'Real Time Scheduler' [1]. Google finds me a bunch of other products too, but I haven't looked at them in depth.
The off-the-shelf software can deal with tens to low hundreds of orders per solution, - which can scale reasonably well if you're willing to divide your service area with boundaries you can't optimise across.
Ocado built a custom system which can support more orders with fewer boundaries; this offers better routing efficiency, which is important as delivery efficiency is a key cost driver. If your business does something like, say, washing machine repair your time-per-customer might be dominated by repair time rather than travel time; in that case you might be able to operate a nationwide business on off-the-shelf software.
The underlying algorithm in Ocado's system is based on simulated annealing [2] - although those precise words don't seem to have made it into the article!
[1] http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/scm/service-optimization-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing