At each Flipkart Delivery hub, an important task is determining the assignment of shipments to vehicles and the specific routes taken by vehicles to deliver the items to customers. Informally, a good assignment is one that minimizes the total distance while also distributing the shipments evenly across the different vehicles and does not have too many overlapping or criss-crossing routes. We formulate the problem statement as a variant of the classic Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and build a solution engine from scratch that implements a set of computational heuristics to solve the problem.

Venkateshan Kannan is a data scientist with the Logistics and Insight team at Flipkart. With a PhD. in statistical physics and postdoc in systems biology, Venkateshan has worked on problems spanning multiple domains in academia and industry. He enjoys approaching problems from first principles.