Automatic Customization Framework for Efficient Vehicle Routing System Deployment

Abstract

Vehicle routing systems provide several advantages over manual transportation planning and they are attracting growing attention. However, deployment of these systems can be prohibitively costly, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises: the customization, integration, and migration is laborious and requires operations research expetise. We propose an automated configuration workflow for vehicle routing system and data flow customization, which provides the necessary basis for more experimental work on the subject. Our preliminary results with learning and adaptive algorithms support the assumption of applicability of the proposed configuration framework. The strategies presented here equip implementers with the methods needed, and give an outline for automating the deployment of these systems. This also opens up new directions for research in vehicle routing systems, data exchange, model inference, automatic algorithm configuration, algorithm selection, software customization, and domain-specific languages.