Show HN: Optimule, a free vehicle routing platform built with Open Route Service | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Optimule, a free vehicle routing platform built with Open Route Service

optimule.com

71 pointsyuppiepuppie14 comments

Hey!

I built this app over the past couple of months as a side project. I have been involved in the sector, and always thought Open Route Service was a real cool project. However, there was no nice UI over it. So I built one that's quite generic and allows users to optimize routes free of charge.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

A shout-out about the mentioned Open Route Service, which is IMO fantastic.

I wrote a small mapping app to do navigation when we moved cross-continent a few years back. I didn't want to have to worry about trying to pull map data over the Internet, since I wasn't certain that I would even have Internet during the journey. I whipped together a small app using map tile data from OSM (great project), got the directions in a usable format (GeoJSON) from Open Route Service (great project) and rendered the entire thing with OpenLayers (https://openlayers.org/), a JS library (great project). We had a USB GPS tracker¹ hooked to a laptop that tracked our route/position.

Open Route Service also includes other things in the data that are nice, and given more time, probably worth taking advantage of. E.g., there was road grade information, which is nice when you're hauling your life behind you in a truck, since then I can tell my driver what to expect.

(We also did occasionally use Google Maps on the phones, too. For some tasks, that was easier.)

¹hardware GPS is so much nicer than phone. Near instant fix, vs. both our phone's 30s to several minute fix times…

Quick feedback: the text of the main button on the page to sign up is too long on mobile. It wraps the button itself around (not just the text inside the button) and partially renders over itself on mobile, making it hard to read.

Thanks! I’ll fix that. I tried to do my best with css and making its all mobile friendly, however styling is not my forte.

Very nice project!

> Optimule uses state-of-the-art routing algorithm's, run thousands of times, which guarantees that the routes generated are the fastest and shortest, while maintaining real-world business and customer constraints.

Which algorithms do you use for routing? Without giving away too much details (in case this is your secret sauce), what is the general approach? From the "guarantees" "fastest and shortest", I infer it's an exact approach rather than a heuristic one. Is it integer programming-based VRP? I thought the SOTA here was very hard to reach (column generation, cutting planes, etc.).

When he mentions Open route serice, I assume none of the route calculations is done by himself, so Optimile is just an UI for Open route service.

I see, thanks!

Open Route Service [1] uses Vroom [2] under the hood. It seems to be based on local search with some "Solomon I1" (?) heuristic. So good heuristic routes (obtained quickly), not optimal ones.

[1] https://openrouteservice.org/

[2] https://github.com/VROOM-Project/vroom

Exactly, the free version here uses Vroom under the hood with ORS. However I do have a branch with other VEhicle routing engines, but it wouldn’t bring too much value unless you had a very specific use case that I could apply it too.

OpenRouteService uses GraphHopper as library which uses exact routing algorithms: https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper (note: I'm one of the co-founders of GraphHopper)

And then this A to B routing gives you the distance matrix which is necessary as input for vehicle routing algorithms (usually heuristics), see https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2017/09/18/route-optimizati... for more details.

Great to see you on here! Thanks so much for Jsprit. Its a great tool that I used for many years.

"our award winning route optimization" seems a bit overstated since you're mostly providing an UI/API wrapper on top of open-source routing/optimization software written by third parties.

Maybe you'd consider mentioning the projects you rely on directly on your website? That would be fair, and also most potential customers will ask anyway. ;-)

free demo link leads to 404 page ( https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfy9tK5a9TZ4PtvGTCv... )

Also, why it would be form rather than a working page?

I'd say 'free demo' here means the author contacts you for a webinar or walk-through. The signup works.

Yeah, that’s right. I forgot to update the landing page. I’ll do that later today. I originally was thinking of monetizing the platform somehow, and I thought I could walk potential clients through it if they had any interest. However I have since deleted the Google account associated with that form.

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