ALTO: A computer system for the design of vehicle routing algorithms

This paper introduces ALTO, an interactive-graphic computer system designed to facilitate the development of routing algorithms for transportation vehicles. This system embodies a ‘general heuristic’, that is, a set of templates that are instantiated by an expert user with his/her own formulas in order to create specific algorithms. By this means, ALTO can be used to reproduce a broad class of routing algorithms already documented in the literature or can be used to devise new resolution strategies for complex problems. An application for a real mail pick-up problem is presented at the end of the paper, in order to emphasize the flexibility of the system.