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:
