Optimizing the order of stops in a vehicle route can be challenging enough assuming an easy check for the feasibility of a given route. However in practice, the conditions that customers and legislation can impose on a route are diverse and mostly very tricky. The basic scientific conditions: time windows for tasks (1), total capacity of the truck (2), and maximum duration of the route (3) all have variants that are highly non-trivial:
1. Consider the best known solutions of the 300 VRPTW benchmarks by Gehring and Homberger. Very small increases of the travel time estimates render all 300 solutions infeasible. Hence a customer requesting robust routes will find these solutions unacceptable.
2. Instead of 1-dimensional loading, the vehicle can have compartments or the loading itself can be a 3-dimensional packing problem.
3. Rules of driving hours, breaks, and rest give additional restrictions on a route, which can depend on the driver driving it.
How to incorporate these conditions while running a routing algorithm is not obvious. We invite the audience to express their opinions on these.
| Subject : | : | Abstracts |
| Topics | : | Brainstorming |
| PDF version | : |  PDF version |
