Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I have the following math-related problem.
We need to schedule deliveries, about 20 per week. We have varying van availability, one with a capacity of 3 and one with a capacity of 6. On top of that there's driver availability which varies a bit.
I'm looking for a preferably purely mathematical way of optimizing our route planning. To assist with this I have access to the google maps API to calculate travel times and make something like a node network . Our starting point is fixed and drivers need to return every day. maximum trip time shouldn't exceed 5 hours, as each delivery takes about 30 mins
Can anyone give me a starting point for further research into this problem? If by any chance you know some software designed for these kind of things, please also let me know :)
This is called the vehicle routing problem, and it has many variants. The Operations Research StackExchange site has a tag designated for it: https://or.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vehicle-routing