Determining a travel route is a very popular task nowadays. However, it is difficult to determine the optimal route. Providers of various types of services offer such solutions in navigation devices or maps available on the Internet. However, these are solutions with limited configuration options.
Most often, optimization boils down to the ability to choose one of the parameters as the main criterion. Among them, we can find such values as distance, travel time, or fuel consumption. However, it is increasingly important to determine the optimal route while taking into account completely different parameters. Additionally, it is important to simultaneously consider all required parameters while ensuring that it is possible to determine their “importance”. Such defined parameters will allow for flexible route planning and optimization of transport operations. This is particularly important in the case of shipping companies or manufacturers or wholesalers supplying their customers with goods. In real-world conditions, we are increasingly encountering the planning of goods deliveries to customers. A vehicle with cargo is tasked with delivering goods to a specific number of customers. Transport costs and time are of primary importance here. It is therefore important to plan the route in such a way as to optimize the desired factors. It is necessary to use an algorithm that allows for the cost of the route to be taken into account. However, it should be noted that the cost of the route is the sum of the costs of traversing individual segments. And the cost of traversing each segment can be completely different in each of the considered route variants. This can be influenced, for example, by the direction of travel of a given segment, especially if there are differences in elevation between its end points. Additionally, when planning a supply chain, we must take into account the increased transport cost at the beginning of the route, resulting from the greater load mass. This parameter is significant especially when planning the transport of goods with a large mass. It is therefore necessary to use algorithms that allow for the cost of traversing each segment to be determined independently in both directions. Furthermore, these algorithms must allow for flexible modifications to their method of operation in order to adapt their performance to the special needs of users. In the author’s opinion, it is possible to introduce such modifications to existing route-finding algorithms so that it is possible to take into account many parameters during its selection.
Route-finding algorithms
Determining a route is possible using various types of search algorithms. The operating principle of these algorithms is based on searching a graph. A road map is transformed into a directed graph. Its nodes correspond to points on the map – most often intersections or towns (depending on the scale and detail of the problem being considered), and the edges represent the roads connecting individual points. The simplest techniques are based on building a search tree, searching it breadth-first, depth-first, or using another technique. In real conditions, however, they are not sufficient due to the inability to take into account the cost of transition between tree nodes. This corresponds to a situation in which the cost of travel between any two points is the same. In reality, such situations do not occur.
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Source: Logistyka Magazine