2021 Amazon last mile routing research challenge : data set

The 2021 Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge, hosted by Amazon.com’s Last Mile Research team, and scientifically supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, prompted participants to leverage real operational data to find new and better ways to solve a real-world routing problem. In this article, we describe the data set released for the research challenge, which includes route-, stop-, and package-level features for 9,184 historical routes performed by Amazon drivers in 2018 in five metropolitan areas in the United States. This real-world data set excludes any personally identifiable information: all route and package identifiers have been randomly regenerated and related location data have been obfuscated to ensure anonymity. Although multiple synthetic benchmark data sets are available in the literature, the data set of the 2021 Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge is the first large and publicly available data set to include instances based on real-world operational routing data.History: This paper has been accepted for the Transportation Science Special Issue on Machine Learning Methods and Applications in Large-Scale Route Planning Problems.