Routing One Million Customers in a Handful of Minutes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new large-scale dataset for Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems and demonstrates an efficient algorithm capable of solving these instances quickly on standard hardware, advancing large-scale routing research.

Contribution

The paper presents a new large-scale CVRP dataset and an improved algorithm, FILO2, that efficiently solves these instances, enhancing scalability and computational speed.

Findings

FILO2 solves large instances rapidly on personal computers.

New dataset is significantly larger than existing benchmarks.

Algorithm improvements enhance scalability over previous versions.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new dataset of Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem instances which are up to two orders of magnitude larger than those in the currently used benchmarks. Despite these sizes might not have an immediate application to real-world logistic scenarios, we believe they could foster fresh new research efforts on the design of effective and efficient algorithmic components for routing problems. We provide computational results for such instances by running FILO2, an adaptation of the FILO algorithm proposed in Accorsi and Vigo (2021), designed to handle extremely large-scale CVRP instances. Solutions for such instances are obtained by using an a standard personal computer in a considerably short computing time, thus showing the effectiveness of the acceleration and pruning techniques already proposed in FILO. Finally, results of FILO2 on well-known literature instances show that the newly introduced changes improve the overall scalability of the approach with respect to the previous FILO design.