A Collaborative Spatial Decision Support System for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem on a Tabletop Display

Abstract

AbstractThe Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem. The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is a widely studied variant of the VRP. Although many Decision Support Systems (DSS) have been implemented to support decision makers solve real life problems of the VRP and its variants, these systems do not allow multiple decision makers to collaborate with each other and explore different scenarios on a specific problem. Recent advances in hardware and software have enabled a new generation of tabletop displays that can sense multiple inputs from different users at the same time. In this paper, we present a collaborative spatial DSS for the CVRP on a tabletop display that allows two decision makers to collaborate with each other in order to find the best possible solution. The locations of the customers to serve are added using interactive Google Maps. The DSS extracts the geographical information of the selected locations, finds the distances between them and solves the problem. The proposed DSS has been implemented using Java, TUIO protocol, jsprit and Google Maps.KeywordsDecision support systemsCapacitated vehicle routing problemTabletopTangible user interfaceGeographical information systems