How FM Logistic tackled the traveling salesman problem at warehouse scale with AlphaEvolve

The traveling salesman problem asks a deceptively simple question: What's the shortest route that visits every point exactly once? It's one of the hardest problems in computer science, and mathematicians have been working on it for nearly a century. It's also what FM Logistic 's warehouse operators face every day in Poland. The facility spans eight football fields. It holds over 17,700 picking locations. And across every shift, up to several dozen operators on ride-on electric trucks crisscross the floor collecting cartons, each one navigating dozens of storage locations per tour. Every unnecessary step adds up: in time, in wear on the fleet, and in delayed fulfillment. FM Logistic, a global logistics provider operating in over 14 countries, had already optimized their routing once. Their existing model used a fast, cost-prioritized allocation logic built for real-time responsiveness. It worked well, but it made decisions step by step, which limited how well it could coordinate routes