Abstract
This paper considers the vehicle routing problem with time windows and stochastic travel times (VRPTW-ST), in which the expected total general cost is minimized by optimally determining the vehicle routes as well as departure times from each node/customer. The VRPTW-ST is mathematically formulated as a stochastic programming model and solved by a branch-and-cut solution algorithm which involves a brand new class of cuts. These cuts serve as the lower bounds of the original objective and hence make the obtained solution to be exact. Some skills to accelerate the rate of convergence are also discussed. Computational results indicate that problems with 25 nodes can be solved to optimality within 10 minutes under the environment of Intel PIII 550 CPU and 128MB RAM.
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