VRP

The vehicle routing problem, usually shortened to VRP, is the name given to a job every distribution operation has to do: decide which vehicle makes which deliveries, and in what order.

It is easy to describe and hard to answer. Even a modest set of deliveries can be arranged in more ways than any computer could work through one at a time. So routing software looks for a good answer rather than proving it has found the best one that exists — and the difference between one piece of software and another is largely how good an answer it finds in the time you are willing to wait.

The version studied at universities is deliberately stripped back: deliveries are a quantity, vehicles are a capacity, and little else. Real operations carry far more detail than that — what will physically fit on the vehicle, which drivers are allowed to drive what, when a customer will accept a delivery — which is what Optrak’s model of your operation is for.