GIS Oriented Platform For Solving Real World Logistic Vehicle Routing Problem

Logistics optimization problems related with vehicle routing such as warehouse locating, track scheduling, customer order delivery, wastage pickup etc. are very interesting and important issues to date. Many Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Systems (VRSS) have been developed/proposed to optimize the logistics problems. But majority of them are dedicated to a particular problem and are unable to handle the real world spatial data directly. The system developed for one problem may not be suitable for others due to inter-problem constraint variations. The constraints may include geographical, environmental and road traffic nature of the working region along with other constraints related with the problem. So the developer always needs to modify the original routing algorithm in order to fulfill the purpose. In our study, we propose a general-purpose platform by combining GIS road map and Database Management System (DBMS), so that VRSS can interact with real world spatial data directly to solve different kinds of vehicle routing problems. Using the features of our developed system, the developer can frequently modify the existing algorithm or create a new one to serve the purpose.