At each Flipkart Delivery hub, an important task is determining the assignment of shipments to vehicles and the specific routes taken by vehicles to deliver the items to customers. Informally, a good assignment is one that minimizes the total distance while also distributing the shipments evenly across the different vehicles and does not have too many overlapping or criss-crossing routes. We formulate the problem statement as a variant of the classic Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and build a solution engine from scratch that implements a set of computational heuristics to solve the problem.
- Description of the context at the Flipkart delivery hub.
- Solution constraints - customer time window, maximum number of shipments per vehicle.
- Defining a non-standard cost function - total travel time, route outliers, compactness of routes.
- Formulating the problem as a variant of VRPTW (vehicle routing problem with time windows).
- Computational complexity: NP-hard (generalization of Traveling Salesman Problem)
- Overview of some exact algorithms.
- Heuristics - (a) construction of routes and (b) route improvement
- Description of our construction step and iterative computational procedure to improve solutions.
- Discussion of results
Nothing in specific, but it helps to have some understanding of optimization procedures.
Venkateshan Kannan is a data scientist with the Logistics and Insight team at Flipkart. With a PhD. in statistical physics and postdoc in systems biology, Venkateshan has worked on problems spanning multiple domains in academia and industry. He enjoys approaching problems from first principles.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MROJoIrCeyNkLtWYanQV5FYDfmGVX1JM/view?usp=sharing
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