Commercial Vehicle Routing

Source

An interesting approach to provide vehicle routing services is: https://routific.com/. You send a spreadsheet with the data (addresses) and get the ordering back,

• The CEO has a degree from Erasmus University in Rotterdam
• They got some funding to get started ($1.2M).
• Article in Fast Company: https://www.fastcoexist.com/3062836/world-changing-ideas/this-bee-inspired-algorithm-helps-delivery-companies-plan-the-most-effi
• One more article: http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/routific-bee-algorithm-delivery/
• This is based on a “Bee Inspired” heuristic. There are quite a few of them:
  artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, honeybees mating optimization (HBMO) algorithm, artificial beehive algorithm (ABHA), bee colony optimization (BCO) algorithm, bee colony inspired algorithm (BCiA), bee swarm optimization (BSO) algorithm, bee system (BS) algorithm, BeeHive algorithm, bees algorithm (BeA), bees life algorithm (BLA), bumblebees algorithm, honeybee social foraging (HBSF) algorithm, OptBees algorithm, simulated bee colony (SBC) algorithm, virtual bees algorithm (VBA), and wasp swarm optimization (WSO) algorithm.  This list is from (1)
• Looks like simple heuristics are preferred, compared to sophisticated mathematical programming based algorithms.

References

1. Bo Xing, Wen-Jing Gao, “Bee Inspired Algorithms”, in Innovative Computational Intelligence: A Rough Guide to 134 Clever Algorithms, 2013.