Vehicle routing and scheduling with dynamic travel times

The field of dynamic vehicle routing and scheduling is growing at a fast pace nowadays, due to many potential applications in courier services, emergency services, truckload and less-than-truckload trucking, and many others. In this paper, a dynamic vehicle routing and scheduling problem with time windows is described where both real-time customer requests and dynamic travel times are considered. Different reactive dispatching strategies are defined and compared through the setting of a single tolerance parameter. The results show that some tolerance to deviations with the current planned solution usually leads to better solutions. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.