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Constrained dynamic vehicle routing problems with time windows

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Abstract

This paper tackles two variants of a Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows as real-world applications of several companies in the Canary Islands, Spain. In these dynamic vehicle routing problems, customer requests can be either known at the beginning of the planning horizon or dynamically revealed over it. Particularly, the problems corresponding to a delivery company and a vending machines company are taken into consideration. In addition to the dynamism feature of these problems, the companies consider several attributes that consist of a fixed heterogeneous fleet of vehicles, multiple time windows, customers priorities and vehicle–customer constraints. This work proposes a metaheuristic procedure to solve these problems. The computational experiments indicate that the proposed method is feasible to solve these real-world problems.

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Notes

  1. http://web.cba.neu.edu/msolomon/problems.htm.

  2. https://sites.google.com/site/gciports/vrptw/dynamic-vrptw.

    Table 2 Dynamic customers
    Full size table
    Table 3 Solution example. Insertion of dynamic requests
    Full size table

  3. http://www.fernuniversitaet-hagen.de/WINF/inhalte/benchmark_data.htm.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (TIN2012-32608) and the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade (TSI-020100-2011-298). Research by Jesica de Armas, supported by the Canary Islands CIE: Tricontinental Atlantic Campus.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, University of La Laguna, San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Spain

    Jesica de Armas & Belén Melián-Batista

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  1. Jesica de Armas
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  2. Belén Melián-Batista
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Correspondence to Belén Melián-Batista.

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Communicated by I. R. Ruiz.

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de Armas, J., Melián-Batista, B. Constrained dynamic vehicle routing problems with time windows. Soft Comput 19, 2481–2498 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-014-1574-4

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