A web service on routing problems to propagate OR algorithms
Résumé
Recently, the “Cloud” has replaced the “Internet” and, despite this big change in the daily approach of communications, academic researchers are still solving the logistic problems in the same way. They gather instances from the companies, usually transform them in text files and solve the corresponding routing problems before sending back their results in another text file that has to be interpreted by decision makers. Moreover, most of the academic researchers are still working on “theoretical problems” for which the instances are sometimes far from reality (e.g. see the classical CVRP instances). In order to make available some realistic instances and organize collaborative development in our field, we propose to implement our main algorithms related to Vehicle Routing Problems and to host them in a web-service based platform that will provide real data from currently available Internet map systems.