Paper Info
Title
Vehicle routing under time-dependent travel times: The impact of congestion avoidance
Abstract
Daily traffic congestion forms a major problem for businesses such as logistic service providers and distribution firms. It causes late arrivals at customers and additional costs for hiring the truck drivers. Such costs caused by traffic congestion can be reduced by taking into account and avoiding predictable traffic congestion within vehicle route plans. In the literature, various strategies are proposed to avoid traffic congestion, such as selecting alternative routes, changing the customer visit sequences, and changing the vehicle-customer assignments. We investigate the impact of these and other strategies in off-line vehicle routing on the performance of vehicle route plans in reality. For this purpose, we develop a set of vehicle routing problem instances on real road networks, and a speed model that reflects the key elements of peak hour traffic congestion. The instances are solved for different levels of congestion avoidance using a modified Dijkstra algorithm and a restricted dynamic programming heuristic. Computational experiments show that 99% of late arrivals at customers can be eliminated if traffic congestion is accounted for off-line. On top of that, about 87% of the extra duty time caused by traffic congestion can be eliminated by clever congestion avoidance strategies.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1016/j.cor.2011.05.027
Computers & OR
Keywords
DocType
Volume
daily traffic congestion,late arrival,peak hour traffic congestion,time-dependent spp,predictable traffic congestion,time-dependent travel time,traffic congestion,off-line vehicle routing,alternative route,speed model,vehicle route plan,clever congestion avoidance strategy,time-dependent vrp,congestion avoidance
Journal
39
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
5
0305-0548
10
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.62
15
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
A. L. Kok1372.30
E. W. Hans2945.82
J. M. J. Schutten315511.57