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Tutorial - vehicle routing & scheduling
ODL Studio uses the excellent jsprit vehicle routing library to provide vehicle routing &
scheduling capabilities. Using the jsprit integration, you can plan a set of routes for your
delivery fleet to efficiently serve a set of delivery points. You can then edit these routes using
our drag-and-drop vehicle route editor, analyse them in various ways, inspect the routes in a
map or export detailed reports to give to your drivers.
Configuring and integrating a vehicle routing solution for your own organisation is a complex
task and you may wish to consider contacting us for details on our consultancy, support and
training packages, to guide you through the process. This tutorial provides an
introduction to the routing and scheduling capabilities available within ODL Studio. You are
advised to work through the earlier tutorials before this tutorial. Firstly, watch the following
tutorial video for an introduction to vehicle routing and scheduling using ODL Studio. Ensure
you watch the video in high resolution, or some controls may not be clear.
Now, following the video step-by-step, do the following:
1. Create demo data
1. Open ODL Studio and create an empty spreadsheet using the new menu item.
2. Create a new vehicle routing script with 1 quantity type and save it to your scripts
directory.
3. Under the Tools option in the new script, click on Create all input tables. This creates
the tables Stops,VehicleTypes and Stops-order in your
spreadsheet. Stops and VehicleTypes hold your input data and your output routes
are held in Stops-order.
4. Under the same option, click Demo - create stops and vehicles. This creates an
artificial input dataset.
5. Save your spreadsheet
2. Run the optimiser
1. Download the pre-built UK road network graph from our downloads page and unzip
to a directory on your computer.
2. Edit the vehicle routing script and under settings, change the script to use real road
network distances, setting the directory to your unzipped directory. ODL Studio uses
the excellent Graphhopper project for road network distance and time
calculations. To find out how to build the file for other countries, see our advanced
configuration tutorial.
3. Click on the optimise icon under the script and wait for the optimisation to finish.
3. Analyse the routes in the map
1. Under the view solution option in the script, click on view routes in map.
2. Navigate around the map to inspect the various routes.
3. Use the legend control to zoom on and show / hide routes.
4. Hover over the individual stops to bring up the tooltip with stop details.
4. Activity breakdown with Gantt chart
1. Click on the Gantt chart icon under the view solution option.
2. Hover over different parts of the Gantt chart to view details on the activities.
5. Editing vehicle routes
1. Under view solution in the script, open the map by clicking on the view routes in
map icon.
2. Open the route editor by clicking on the Edit routes icon.
3. As shown in the video, use the route editor control to drag stops off and between
routes. You can also change the ordering of stops within a route by dragging them.
6. Creating pdf reports of your routes
1. Click on the reports icon under your script to generate a report.
2. From the reporter viewer control, save the report to pdf (see example file here). If
you want to automatically export the report to pdf or another format, or change the
report format, see our tutorials on reporting or contact us for support and training.
We can build custom route reports for you.
7. Viewing and exporting route statistics
1. Examine the various detail statistics tables.
2. Export them to the spreadsheet using the Export solution tables option.
To use vehicle route planning in a production system, you need to populate your Excel
spreadsheet automatically from your customer resource management or enterprise resource
planning system. You may also wish to generate the vehicle routes and reports as part of an
automated batch process using our ODL Connect product.
If you’d like to use travel times and distances from another map provider (e.g. Google or
Navteq / HERE) then see the tutorial on using an external travel distances and times text file
matrix.
This tutorial used a relatively simple vehicle routing model - the multi-depot vehicle routing
problem with time windows. The jsprit library can model many different sorts of vehicle
routing problems and ODL Studio can be customised as needed to support them. Contact
us for details if you’d like to model:
Backhauls
Custom constraints
Driver and stop skills
Open or closed routes
Pickup and delivery problems (also known as collect-deliver problems)
Vehicle-dependent speeds
... and many more!
Optimised vehicle route