Dynamic shortest path problems: Hybrid routing policies considering network disruptions

Abstract

Traffic network disruptions lead to significant increases in transportation costs. We consider networks in which a number of links are vulnerable to these disruptions leading to a significantly higher travel time on these links. For these vulnerable links, we consider known link disruption probabilities and knowledge of transition probabilities for recovering from or getting into a disruption. We develop a framework based on dynamic programming in which we formulate and evaluate different known online and offline routing policies. Next to this, we develop computation-time-efficient hybrid routing policies. To test the efficiency of the different routing policies, we develop a test bed of networks based on a number of characteristics and analyze the results in terms of routes, cost performance and calculation times. Our results show that a significant part of the cost reduction can be obtained by considering only a limited part of the network in detail. The performance of our proposed hybrid policy is only slightly worse than the optimal policy.