A probabilistic approach to pickup and delivery problems with time window uncertainty

In this paper, we study a dynamic and stochastic pickup and delivery problem proposed recently by Srour, Agatz and Oppen. We demonstrate that the cost structure of the problem permits an effective solution method without generating multiple scenarios. Instead, our method is based on a careful analysis of the transfer probability from one customer to the other. Our computational results confirm the effectiveness of our approach on the dataset of Srour et al., as well as on new, large problem instances. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.