A good way to get a feeling for the competition data is to explore interactive displays, zooming in to see stop-by-stop details of both the driver routes and the computed tours. For this we have created the following four types of route maps.
Display the selected tour type. Marker numbers indicate the order in which stops are visited in the tour.
Tours 0038
Click the Start button to animate the selected tour, growing the route stop-by-stop in the tour order.
Animate 0038
Simultaneous display of two or more tour types. Expanded markers indicate the selected routes.
Compare 0038
Movement is used to indicate travel direction. The paths resemble moving walkways, like in airports.
Motion 0038In each of the maps, you can select one of four tour types in the menu displayed in the top right corner.
• Driver Tour → Route taken by the Amazon van driver.
• ATSP Tour → A shortest-possible tour using the Amazon travel-time estimates.
• Zone Tour → A shortest-possible tour subject to the constraint that stops with matching sort zone IDs appear consecutively.
• JPT Tour → A tour computed by our competition code to mimic routes taken by van drivers.
For the Animate maps, you can change the speed using the slider in the top left corner -- if the animation is already running, click the Start button to restart the animation at the new speed.
The shortest stop-to-stop paths in the maps are generated with the Open Source Routing Machine using Open Street Map data. Note, however, that the tours are optimized using Amazon travel times, rather than the physical lengths of the paths.
In the table below we give links to the four maps for routes starting from each of the 17 depot stations covered in the Amazon Challenge data set. The driver tour for each of these routes was rated as High quality and in each case there were no undelivered packages.
Click on the route number to see a quick summary of the route, including the lengths (in seconds) and competition scores for the different tours tupes.
Click on the images to see high-resolution snapshots.
The map drawings were created with the Leaflet open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps.
Tour animation in the Animate maps is provided by the Leaflet plugin SnakeAnim, written by Ivan Sanchez.
The movement in the Motion maps is created with Rubens Pinheiro's leaflet-ant-path plugin.
When viewing the Animate maps with the Safari browser, you may see that the path drawing gets ahead of itself, rendering two parts simultaneously. Sorry! It appears to work fine on the Chrome, Edge, and Firefox browsers.