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When is a route really feasible in practice?
Bas Den Heijer  1, *@  , Gerhard Post  1@  
1 : ORTEC
* : Corresponding author

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.


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