VRPBench: A Vehicle Routing Benchmark Tool

Abstract

The number of optimization techniques in the combinatorial domain is large and diversified. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of real benchmarks to validate optimization algorithms. In this work we introduce VRPBench, a tool to create instances and visualize solutions to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in a planar graph embedded in the Euclidean 2D space. We use VRPBench to model a real-world mail delivery case of the city of Artur Nogueira. Such scenarios were characterized as a multi-objective optimization of the VRP. We extracted a weighted graph from a digital map of the city to create a challenging benchmark for the VRP. Each instance models one generic day of mail delivery with hundreds to thousands of delivery points, thus allowing both the comparison and validation of optimization algorithms for routing problems.