A simulation and visualization tool for the dynamic and stochastic vehicle routing problem with time windows

The Vehicle Routing Problem consists in optimizing a set of routes for a fleet of vehicles in order to serve a set of requests issued by customers. Many variants exist, including dynamic variants where the requests appear while the vehicles are moving. It is then necessary to modify the existing solution to take into account the new requests that appear. These problems are heavily studied by the scientific community and many algorithms have been proposed to solve them. When implementing a solver for a dynamic problem, it is imperative to be very careful when each request is ’revealed’ and can then be taken into consideration to build a solution. The first goal of this master thesis is to provide a tool that simulates the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem to a solver, so that the solver no longer has to deal with the simulation of the problem. In addition to simplifying the development of new solvers, this tool also aims to be used to perform simulations, recover all the solutions returned by a solver during a simulation, and thus facilitate the analysis of solver performance. Finally, the tool we propose also make it possible to visualize a problem instance as well as the solutions returned by a solver. The tool allows to visualize the simulation process, showing the current solution, the position of the vehicles and the routes assigned to them. In this these, we also show how to use the tool and how to integrate it into a solver.