VeRoViz: Vehicle Routing Visualization

This archive is distributed in association with the INFORMS Journal on Computing under the MIT License.

The software and data in this repository are a snapshot of the software and data that were used in the research reported on in the paper VeRoViz: A Vehicle Routing Visualization Toolkit by L. Peng and C. Murray. The snapshot is based on this SHA in the development repository.

Important: This code is being developed on an on-going basis at https://github.com/optimatorlab/veroviz. Please go there if you would like to get a more recent version or would like support.

VeRoViz is a suite of tools (primarily written in Python) to easily generate, test, and visualize vehicle routing problems.

Key features of the Python tools include:

Generation of nodes on road networks;
Calculation of travel time/distance matrices using external data providers;
Creation of Leaflet maps to view nodes, routes, and basic geometric shapes; and
Generation of dynamic CesiumJS content to view 4D "movies" of vehicle routing problems.

All Python source code is hosted in this repository. Documentation, examples, contact information are available from the VeRoViz project website.

About VeRoViz

VeRoViz is an open-source project from the Optimator Lab, in the University at Buffalo's Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering.

This project began in 2018 as a tool for our research lab. It is under ongoing development.

The prototypical VeRoViz user is someone who is developing models, algorithms, or heuristics for a vehicle routing problem (entities that move between locations). Sketch can also be used as a teaching tool in the classroom to introduce vehicle routing concepts.

The aim of VeRoViz is to help such a user

obtain road network data,
sketch the locations of nodes (e.g., customers and depots),
visualize arcs (connections) among these nodes,
generate 3D movies showcasing solutions to vehicle routing problems,
quickly generate test problems and distance (and/or time) matrices.

VeRoViz is not an optimization package. If you're interested in vehicle routing solvers, you might consider GraphHopper, Vroom, OR-Tools, VeRyPy, or VRPy.

Cite

To cite this software, please cite the paper using its DOI (TBD) and the software itself using its DOI.

Below is the BibTex for citing this version of the code.

@article{veroviz2021,
  author    = {Lan Peng and Chase Murray},
  title     = {{VeRoViz}: A Vehicle Routing Visualization Toolkit}, 
  publisher = {INFORMS Journal on Computing},
  year      = {2021},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.5595093},
  url       = {https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2020.0340},
}

Contact

For general inquiries, send email to: info@veroviz.org.
Follow VeRoViz on Twitter: @veroviz_org
We use a GitHub issue tracker to monitor bugs and enhancement requests. Please report any issues you encounter or let us know of any new features you'd like us to incorporate in VeRoViz.

About Us

Lan Peng is the VeRoViz Lead Developer. He is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University at Buffalo.
Chase Murray is the VeRoViz Project Director. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University at Buffalo.

We hope that VeRoViz adds value to your vehicle routing research. As always, we welcome your feedback (in the form of comments about how you're using the tool, issues you're experiencing, or ideas for new functionality).

Contribute to VeRoViz

We welcome contributions from the vehicle routing community. Please, help us make VeRoViz better!

Here's how you can help:

Report bugs/errors/oddities. This helps us know if something's broken.
Suggest a new feature. We tried to think of all of the clever ways people might use VeRoViz, but we probably forgot something. Let us know what you think would help make your life easier.
Submit a pull request. If you have some code that would fix an issue and/or improve VeRoViz, a pull request is the best way to incorporate that code into the package. We haven't had any pull requests from outside collaborators, so we haven't yet worked out our preferred workflow. So, if you're thinking of contributing code, please send us an email first, so we can jointly decide the best way to collaborate.