The shortest path: Comparison of different approaches and implementations for the automatic routing of vehicles

Abstract

The routing of vehicles or personnel in complex logistics systems is a task that needs to be solved in numerous applications, e.g., detailed models of transport networks or order picking areas. The number of relevant nodes in such networks can easily exceed 10,000 nodes. Often, a basic task is finding the shortest path from one node (start) to another (destination). Within the last years various simulation tools have been extended by respective algorithms. However, the execution time of the simulation model may significantly depend on the number of nodes in the network. We present algorithms from the literature and a comparison of three simulation tools with respect to execution time and model size for different scenarios. We further present an approach to work with so called sub-networks, i.e., the network is separated into areas, where finding the shortest path includes the task of starting at a node in one sub-network with a destination in another one.