EPIC

10 Jan 2026 18:05

Economic Platform Integrating Communities (EPIC) is the technology to ensure efficient delivery (literally) of the Local Relay service.

EPIC is the integration of a variety of freely available Open Source software packages:

  • VROOM (Vehicle Routing Open-source Optimisation Machine) vroom
  • OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine) osrm
  • OSM (Open Street Map) osm

You can see a working example here: epic.localrelay.org

This example uses:

  • 300 locations across the South Hams (mostly farms, village halls)
  • Register of 10 vehicles
  • Randomly chose 10 start and end points – journeys
  • Randomly create 10 shipments from location A to B – jobs

EPIC computes routes based on:

  • least impact on original journey time and distance
  • vehicle-type
  • spare capacity
  • load
  • time-slots … and many other criteria are possible

For those of a techy disposition, below is a block diagram of the system: