VRPLIB v2

[leonlan]

This issue keeps track of plans for a new major release of VRPLIB. This is a long-term goal and will be developed in parallel with the needs of PyVRP.

vrplib (v1) was originally designed to support any kind of free-form VRPLIB instance, mainly because the VRPLIB format was not well defined. Its main use cases were reading the instances for the CVRP X-instances, the VRPTW EURO-NeurIPS instances and some of the LKH-3 instances.

PyVRP is continuously adding support for new VRP variants and we are extending the VRPLIB format to support this. At some point, we will have a large collection of VRPLIB instances and a better well-defined format.

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In view of these developments, I propose the following todos for the next major release:

• A well-defined VRPLIB format for many VRP variants. Basically https://pyvrp.org/dev/supported_vrplib_fields.html combined with the current README.
  • Supersede TSPLIB #94. We should probably not supersede TSPLIB95, because it contains a lot of specifications that are just not relevant. But we should definitely take inspiration from TSPLIB95.
  • Parse non-tabular section data #108. I don't know yet if we should support non-tabular data sections.
  • Handle rounding conventions #111. A common annoyance in benchmarking is how to deal with rounding conventions. This should be better defined.
  • This VRPLIB format definition can be version-controlled and could evolve together with the vrplib package.
• Reading instances and solutions should return a Instance or Solution object with well-defined VRPLIB attributes.
  • It would be nice to keep a flexible way of reading VRPLIB instances with undefined specifications/sections, so that we can easily extend the VRPLIB format.
  • Validate instance and solution data #99. If we have a well-defined format, we can also validate if an instance is VRPLIB-style or not.
  • We can switch over to a parsing grammar like lark or pyparsing.
• Maintain a library of VRPLIB instances
  • We already do this in PyVRP/Instances, but we only keep selected instances for benchmarking. There are many more VRPLIB instances that I have created that we don't have a place for anywhere. It would be nice to have these stored somewhere as well for others to use.
• Drop support for downloading instances. This is a legacy feature that originated from when this package was called cvrplib.
• Read/write should be a no-op, meaning that when you read an instance and then write the instance, then this give precisely the same instance again.
• Drop support for Solomon instances.

[N-Wouda]

[ ] Read/write should be a no-op, meaning that when you read an instance and then write the instance, then this give precisely the same instance again.

I was going to write this out into a separate issue, but since it's already tracked here I won't have to :). It'll be good to have this in because it makes adapting instances to VRPLIB much easier.