vrpr

A production-grade vehicle routing problem (VRP) solver for R.

vrpr brings the state-of-the-art PyVRP solver to R. It vendors PyVRP's high-performance C++ core and rewires it with cpp11, wrapped in an idiomatic, tidyverse-style API: a pipe-friendly model builder, data in tibbles, and logging via cli — with no Python runtime dependency.

It fills a real gap in the R ecosystem: there are ompr, ROI, lpSolve, igraph and dodgr, but no modern, strong, friendly solver for production vehicle routing.

Highlights

• All the classic VRP variants, from one tidy interface: capacitated VRP, time windows (VRPTW), heterogeneous fleets, multiple depots (MDVRP), prize-collecting with optional clients and mutually exclusive groups, simultaneous pickup & delivery / backhaul, paired pickup-and-delivery shipments (PDP/PDPTW), and multi-trip routes.
• Fast — the search runs entirely in PyVRP's C++ core (iterated local search with late-acceptance hill-climbing). No Python required.
• Verified parity with PyVRP — identical objective, and on the X-n101-k25 benchmark (optimum 27591) both reach the optimum in 20 s (see tools/benchmark/).
• Reads standard instances (VRPLIB / TSPLIB and Solomon) and plots solutions with ggplot2.

Installation

Install the released version from CRAN:

install.packages("vrpr")

Or the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("StrategicProjects/vrpr")

A C++20 toolchain is required to build from source (R >= 4.3).

Quick start

library(vrpr)

clients <- tibble::tibble(
  x = c(10, 25, 40, 15), y = c(5, 30, 12, 22),
  demand = c(10, 15, 8, 12)
)

res <- vrp_model() |>
  add_depot(x = 0, y = 0) |>
  add_clients(clients) |>
  add_vehicle_type(num_available = 3, capacity = 50) |>
  vrp_solve(stop = max_runtime(2))

cost(res)      # objective cost
routes(res)    # tibble: route_id, depot, position, client, vehicle_type, ...
summary(res)   # one-row summary
plot(res)      # the routes, with {ggplot2}

Variants

Variant	How
Time windows (VRPTW)	add tw_early, tw_late, service to clients
Heterogeneous fleet	call add_vehicle_type() several times with different capacities/costs
Multiple depots (MDVRP)	several add_depot() + add_vehicle_type(depot = i)
Prize-collecting	required = FALSE + prize on clients; add_client_group() for exclusive sets
Pickup & delivery / backhaul	add a pickup column to clients
Paired pickup-and-delivery (PDP)	add_shipments() with pickup/delivery points
Multi-trip	add_vehicle_type(reload_depots = i, max_reloads = k)

See the Getting started guide and the Articles for worked examples of each.

Distances and durations

By default vrpr uses the rounded Euclidean distance between coordinates, and travel time equals distance. For real road networks, pass your own matrices (e.g. from OSRM, osrm, osmnx, or any routing engine) to vrp_solve() or vrp_problem_data():

# dist: n x n metres, time: n x n seconds, for depots, then clients
# (then shipment pickup/delivery pairs), in the order they were added.
res <- vrp_model() |>
  add_depot(x = 0, y = 0) |>
  add_clients(clients) |>
  add_vehicle_type(num_available = 3, capacity = 50) |>
  vrp_solve(stop = max_runtime(2), distance = dist, duration = time)

Matrices may be asymmetric and must be integer-valued (round to metres/seconds first). With explicit matrices, the coordinates are only used by plot().

Reading standard instances

m <- read_vrplib(system.file("extdata", "sample-n6-k2.vrp", package = "vrpr"))
m <- read_solomon(system.file("extdata", "sample-solomon.txt", package = "vrpr"))
res <- m |> vrp_solve(stop = max_runtime(5))

How it works

vrpr is a thin, idiomatic R skin over PyVRP's C++ engine:

1. Tidy R API — you build a model from tibbles and call vrp_solve().
2. R orchestration — the iterated local search loop, penalty manager and stopping criteria, a faithful port of PyVRP's IteratedLocalSearch.
3. cpp11 binding — long-lived C++ objects travel as external pointers; data crosses as tibbles and matrices, with integer-measure validation at the boundary.
4. Vendored PyVRP C++ core (src/vendor/pyvrp/, version pinned in tools/PYVRP_VERSION) — the hot compute: problem data, cost evaluation, solutions and the local-search operators.

The light R loop drives the heavy C++ search, so you get PyVRP-grade performance with a pure-R, Python-free workflow.

License

MIT. Derived from PyVRP (© PyVRP contributors, Thibaut Vidal, ORTEC), whose copyright is preserved; see inst/COPYRIGHTS.