How do I compare my Nextmv routes with my current solution?

We often get asked how to compare Nextmv routing solutions with either your actual routes or solutions from another provider. There are two methods we support for making this comparison.

If you are using OR-Tools to solve your routing problem currently, you can do the following:

• Initialize an ortools template.
• Paste your model code into that template.
• Initialize a nextroute template.
• Modify constraints and objective function as-needed.
• Unify input and output schemas between the two apps.
• Add KPIs following the custom statistics convention for both apps.
• Create an app where you'll push both versions of the model.
• Push up each model, creating versions and instances for each (be sure to name your versions appropriately according to the solver type).
• Use Nextmv Experiments to compare the two instances.

Alternatively, if you prefer, you can use our inital_stops feature to compare the solutions. To use this feature to compare Nextmv routing to your current solution, you can do the following:

• Obtain historical route data (e.g. vehicle-1-start -> stop-A -> stop-B -> vehicle-1-end) from your current solution.
• Create a set of input files representing input to Nextmv solver.
• Create another set of input files in the same format but passing in your historical route assignments through as initial stops with fixed = true.
  • The Nextmv routing engine will read this in and output metrics for comparing Nextmv routing output to your current solution.
• Add KPIs following the custom statistics convention.
• Use Nextmv Experiments to compare the two sets of files.