Optimization without vehicle start locations?

[LarsLehmann]

Hi,

this is our case:

• we want to optimize for instance 100 shipments.
• we have a given amount of vehicles with different types
• the location where the vehicles start is not known

When we now want to optimize this scenario, we always have to specify a start_location for each vehicle.

The problem is, that we only get a real optimized solution, when every vehicle type is available everywhere on the map.

We could spawn more vehicles all over the map to optimize their utilization, but then we could get a result which uses more vehicle of type as we have.

Or we spawn the vehicles randomly in the map, but then the utilization is not really optimized anymore.

Question:
Is there a way to optimize a number of shipments, without telling where the vehicles are located? Or is there workaround for this?

Thanks in advance!

[karussell]

I hope I did not misunderstand your usecase … I think @stefan made it possible

New Feature: Solve vehicle routing problems without knowing the actual start locations of the vehicles

You have orders, but don’t know where your drivers start from? We are happy to announce that you can now solve these kind of problems. Until now, you always had to think of some starting point, which in many cases led to suboptimal solutions. Now you can solve this problem detached from actual starting points. If you want to solve this problem, you can now simply leave out the starting address of the vehicle. For example, the simplest vehicle specification can look like this: { "vehicle_id"…

[LarsLehmann]

cool! We’ll try that.

But you should have a look at your documentation, the starting point is still marked as required:
https://docs.graphhopper.com/#operation/solveVRP

[karussell]

Thanks! @stefan can / should we update the docs?

[stefan]

The doc is updated. Thanks @LarsLehmann and @karussell.