Route optimization for maintaining road quality

Abstract

Velotech Solutions (VTS) is a company specialised in detecting damages in public spaces, such as road damages, non-working light posts or crooked traffic signs. This detection happens by bike or by car, and covers every street in the city or neighbourhood. The routes for navigation are currently created by hand. In this thesis, a proposal is given for the first step of automating this process meeting the requests of Velotech Solutions. A mathematical model is formulated for creating the routes. Firstly, the basic model is formulated to minimize the total distance of all routes that are created. Secondly, minimization of self crossings in every route is added. This is the main request, to prevent routes from becoming too complicated for the navigation devices and cyclists. Thirdly, two solution methods are presented. In the first one, all routes are created at once. In the second one, routes are created one-by-one. The methods are applied to the neighbourhoods Parkwijk and Boeier. From the results, the conclusion is drawn that the first solution method gives the most logical routes. However, the second method, is able to handle larger sets of data, since the solution space is smaller when creating only one route at the time. Lastly, recommendations for further research are given. These include research on the input parameters, the behaviour of the second method on larger datasets and using heurisitcs to solve this problem instead of exact solution methods.