Who is doing the best job at route optimization (traveling salesman)?
I felt this pain myself the other day. Our network was overloaded due to normal Christmas peak coupled with quarantine purchases and UPS/FedEx turning away excess volume. I’m not an ops guy but I volunteered to go out and make deliveries in my wife’s SUV. I wrote the React Native app our drivers use to make deliveries, and I thought it would be a good chance to see how my app performed in a real world scenario. Well, the app did a great job but the backend process that optimizes drivers’ routes left me thinking we can do better. More than once the route order would have taken me right by addresses that were down the road from each other.
I’m not sure exactly what the problem is really, and will be digging into that with our existing service. Maybe the larger number of residential addresses we deliver to these days compared to last year plays a part. We use here: https://developer.here.com/ It costs $500 a month. I’m interested in experimenting with the solutions that are out there, but a Google search brings up a wall of ads. Has anyone else experimented in this space? I realize traveling salesman will never be 100% solved, but I know there are a lot of people who are interested in finding a solution. What services or approaches have worked for you?