Dynamic Transportation Networks in Vehicle Routing and Scheduling

Abstract

In the classical vehicle-routing problem (VRP), the underlying geographic model typically represents a road network. When this network is represented as a directed graph, driving any arc in the graph is always physically possible. In areas where customers are located on various islands, ferries must be used to transport trucks. In a graphical representation of such a transportation network, some of the arcs are present only at discrete times. I considered aspects of dynamic arcs in relation to the use of existing insertion heuristics for vehicle routing and scheduling problems with time window constraints (VRSPTW) and designed a specific algorithm for this special type of problem.