📈 #12 From Pizzerias to Paramedics: How VRP is Transforming Modern Logistics
Helping businesses saving money and improving customer service by delivering goods and services more quickly and efficiently.
Radikal Bikers, a fast-paced motorcycle popular racing game from the late 90s, was a favorite of mine.
I used to play non-stop.
The goal was to deliver pizzas around the city in a competition with 3 more pizzerias, and along the way you could pick up power-ups to improve your speed or time.
But one question always lingered in my mind: why are 4 different pizzerias competing to deliver exactly the same pizza to the same people? Wouldn't it be more efficient if a single pizzeria delivered multiple orders at once?
This question highlights the potential for inefficiencies in the pizza delivery industry, which is why I'm excited to explore the optimization problem of finding the most efficient way to deliver multiple orders from a single pizzeria.
Today in Feasible, we'll see this problem and learn how it can be solved to save businesses money and improve customer service.
Let's go for it!
🚚 Vehicle Routing Problem, or VRP
The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a combinatorial optimization problem that asks for the best set of routes for a fleet of vehicles to traverse in order to serve a given set of customers.
The VRP generalizes the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which asks for the shortest route for a single vehicle to visit each of a set of customers exactly once and return to the starting point. If you remember the TSP is because we talked about it some posts ago:
The VRP is a complex problem because it must take into account a number of factors, such as:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Feasible to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.