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A comment on The software routing 260,000 grocery deliveries a week. Parent comment

Re:The software routing 260,000 grocery deliveries a week by contingencies on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @09:48PM (#15024361)
Do you route based on anything except distance? Obviously you can't deliver to people at 2AM, and drivers want to get home by a reasonable hour, but what about other stuff like weather and road traffic conditions, priority or late parcels, etc? If so, how do you weight these competing and probabilistic concerns?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_routing_problem#VRP_va...

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Re:The software routing 260,000 grocery deliveries a week by michaelt on Wednesday August 16, 2017 @09:12AM (#15027144)
We take into account long-term trends in weather and traffic conditions like road works, school holidays, and recurring traffic patterns.

The drivers' sat navs also (IIRC) have live traffic, which can send them down different _roads_ in response to things like accidents causing traffic jams.

Of course, there are limits to our ability to respond quickly to changes in traffic conditions for simple logistical reasons - many drivers' vans are loaded once at the start of an 8-hour shift, and we can't predict traffic accidents 8 hours before they happen!

Certain other competing concerns are balanced with a 'cost function' which has been tuned empirically.

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