The jsprit-project has been created and is maintained by Stefan Schröder.
It is motivated by two issues.
First, you can find vehicle routing problems everywhere in the world of distributing and moving things and people. This probably explains why there is an almost endless list of papers and algorithms to tackle these problems. However there are only very few open source implementations and even fewer projects that can deal with real world problems that usually have many side-constraints.
Second, it is motivated by my PhD-project at KIT where I apply vehicle routing algorithms to model behaviour of freight agents to assess (freight) transport policy measures.
It is mainly inspired by my research group at KIT-ECON, and a great open-source project called MATSim and its developers.