Hybrid Metaheuristics for Dynamic and Stochastic Vehicle Routing

Abstract

Recent developments in telematics, such as the wide spread use of positioning services and mobile communication technologies, allow the exact monitoring of vehicles. These advances build the basis for automatic real-time fleet management systems. To be successful such systems have to rely on optimization algorithms for solving dynamic and stochastic vehicle routing problems based on ingredients such as historical data, stochastic modeling, machine learning, fast shortest-path calculation, fast construction heuristics, and exact and (meta)heuristic optimization methods. This book documents the growing interest in and success of hybrid metaheuristics. They are often used to solve complex and large real-world optimization problems, combining advantages from various fields of computer science and mathematical optimization. Within this chapter the application of such methods for the dynamic and stochastic vehicle routing problem is studied. After a general introduction in this field, the main commonalities of dynamic and stochastic vehicle routing problems are described and a short overview of classical algorithms for these problems is given. Then, in the third part hybrid metaheuristics for dynamic problems vehicle routing problems are be described. The third part focusses on stochastic problems. The fourth part examines the combination of dynamic and stochastic problems. The chapter is concluded with an outlook towards future developments in the field as well as promising open research areas.