Ask HN: Do you use an optimization solver? Which one? Do you like it?

Re:Ask HN: Do you use an optimization solver? Which one? Do ... by sa46 on Thursday April 21, 2022 @12:32AM (#31106057)

Related question, what are broad recommendations for vehicle routing with capacity, time windows, and a smattering of other constraints? I'm a generalist SWE by trade and my (shallow) survey of the field revealed:

General solvers:

- LocalSolver: good docs, reasonable pricing, docs make it sound fast

- ORTools: Open source, we we're leaning towards this since we're not doing anything incredibly fancy and it'd be nice to embed the solver in our server.

- Gurobi: major player in the space, will charge you an arm and a few legs.

Vehicle routing specific solvers were covered in absolutely outstanding detail by "Open Source Routing Engines And Algorithms – An Overview" [1].

We were leaning towards ORTools since we didn't want to get charged by number of jobs or compute. LocalSolver also seemed promising.

Also, is there a cost-efficient way to get distance matrices for ~50 stops? Google maps and Mapbox are wicked expensive. Is PostGIS reasonable?

[1]: https://gis-ops.com/open-source-routing-engines-and-algorith...

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Re:Ask HN: Do you use an optimization solver? Which one? Do ... by datadrvnsupchn on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @12:10PM (#31169255)

VRPs are extremely complex MIPs so usually heuristics are used. So ortools is probably the best option in this case for cost.

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Re:Ask HN: Do you use an optimization solver? Which one? Do ... by feydaykyn on Thursday April 21, 2022 @01:01AM (#31106163)

We use OpenStreetMap Routing containers. There's a bit of setup, but it works great!

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