qgis - Efficient route planning between a set of points and with a set of people

I have the following use case:

A company needs to make winter service at a set of addresses in a city. To be as fast as possible covering all addresses an efficient route calculation is required. However, it shouldn't be one single route between all addresses but a set of routes depending on the number of workers. So if the company has 4 workers the algorithm should find the most efficient SET of 4 routes between all addresses in which no address is covered twice. The start and end of each route is same (being the building of the company) and each route should cover a similar amount of addresses

Is there an algorithm for that particular use case? I am using QGIS 2.18.

Answer

You are just going into the classic Travelling salesman problem (TSP) , so there is not only one algorithm for it, but whole research area.

Working with QGIS, I suggest you to have a look to these two tools:

1. The pgRouting Project, which has some toold to deal with OpenStreetMap data


2. The Traveling salesman problem in GRASS