Simple Vehicle Routing is a problem related to finding the "optimum" path between a set of locations. The rub here is dealing with real-world addresses and road data (ie. traffic, condition, etc.). Google documentation (or propaganda) will say this is easy but that's slightly misleading.
What I've learned:
1. Setting up to use the Google Maps APIs (yes APIs; we are going to use most of the it) needs a billing account or credit card. Although, it will not cost you anything because Google is giving you usd$200 month credit. So unless, you exceed 200 bucks worth of usage, it won't cost you anything BUT it's a good idea to set a limit just in case.
2. Jupyter Notebooks is handy to figure out and test stuff. It's just a little finicky getting it to run. For example:
- I had to rollback ipywidgets to 7.7.2 from the latest 8.0.9 to get gmaps to work
- I had to change python versions from 3.11 to 3.9 because scipy was being a bitch when installing ortools. Ortools has dependencys to scipy. Luckily I already use pyenv so this was relatively painless.
Ref:
- https://woolpert.com/managing-simple-vrp-with-google-maps-platform/
- https://developers.google.com/optimization/routing/vrp
- https://jupyter-gmaps.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72371859/attributeerror-module-collections-has-no-attribute-iterable
