VRPBench: A Vehicle Routing Benchmark Tool
This provides a domain-specific benchmark for researchers and practitioners in optimization to validate routing algorithms, though it is incremental as it builds on existing VRP frameworks.
The authors tackled the lack of real benchmarks for combinatorial optimization by introducing VRPBench, a tool that creates and visualizes Vehicle Routing Problem instances based on a real-world mail delivery case in Artur Nogueira, resulting in a benchmark with hundreds to thousands of delivery points for algorithm comparison.
The number of optimization techniques in the combinatorial domain is large and diversified. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of real benchmarks to validate optimization algorithms. In this work we introduce VRPBench, a tool to create instances and visualize solutions to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in a planar graph embedded in the Euclidean 2D space. We use VRPBench to model a real-world mail delivery case of the city of Artur Nogueira. Such scenarios were characterized as a multi-objective optimization of the VRP. We extracted a weighted graph from a digital map of the city to create a challenging benchmark for the VRP. Each instance models one generic day of mail delivery with hundreds to thousands of delivery points, thus allowing both the comparison and validation of optimization algorithms for routing problems.