Exact Solution for Vehicle Routing Problem with Soft Time Windows and Dynamic Travel Time

Abstract

The traffic conditions in urban areas change with time due to varying congestion levels and incidents, resulting in unexpected variations of travel time on the infrastructure links. These conditions lead to the formulation of the Dynamic Vehicle Routing and scheduling Problem with Soft Time Windows (D-VRPSTW) with dynamic travel time in the city logistics field. This paper presents a column generation-based exact solution approach for the D-VRPSTW. The performance evaluation on a test instance under different dynamic travel time events shows that the D-VRPSTW solutions based on the updated travel times result in significant cost savings as compared to the static version.