Title
Optimizing departure times in vehicle routes
Abstract
Most solution methods for the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) develop routes from the earliest feasible departure time. In practice, however, temporary traffic congestion make such solutions non-optimal with respect to minimizing the total duty time. Furthermore, the VRPTW does not account for driving hours regulations, which restrict the available travel time for truck drivers. To deal with these problems, we consider the vehicle departure time optimization (VDO) problem as a post-processing of a VRPTW. We propose an ILP formulation that minimizes the total duty time. The results of a case study indicate that duty time reductions of 15% can be achieved. Furthermore, computational experiments on VRPTW benchmarks indicate that ignoring traffic congestion or driving hours regulations leads to practically infeasible solutions. Therefore, new vehicle routing methods should be developed that account for these common restrictions. We propose an integrated approach based on classical insertion heuristics.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1016/j.ejor.2010.10.017
European Journal of Operational Research
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Integer programming,Departure time scheduling,Time-dependent travel times,Driving hours regulations
Journal
210
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
0377-2217
16
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.80
16
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
A. L. Kok1372.30
E. W. Hans2945.82
J. M. J. Schutten315511.57