Advanced routing for city logistics service providers based on time-dependent travel times

Abstract

Increasing traffic demand, recurring congestion and sophisticated e-commerce business models lead to enormous challenges for routing in city logistics. We introduce a planning system for city logistics service providers, which faces those challenges by more realistic vehicle routing considering time-dependent travel times. Time-dependent travel times arise from telematics-based traffic data collection city-wide. Well-known heuristics for the Traveling Salesman Problem and for the Vehicle Routing Problem are adapted to time-dependent planning data. Computational experiments allow for insights into the efficiency of individual heuristics, their adaptability to time-dependent planning data sets, and the quality and structure of resulting delivery tours.