Title: Heuristics for the Real-time Pickup-and-Delivery Travelling Salesman Problem

Authors: Ch. S.N. Chandra Sunil Kumar, T.T. Narendran

Addresses: Department of Management Studies, IIT-Madras, Chennai-600 036, India. ' Department of Management Studies, IIT-Madras, Chennai-600 036, India

Abstract: Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) under static conditions have been studied for well over four decades. The rapid advances in technology and the present market dynamics have now made it imperative for the dynamic version of the VRP to be addressed. This paper considers the dynamic version of the Pickup-and-Delivery Travelling Salesman Problem (PDTSP). Express couriers, dial-a-ride systems, and partial-truck-load carriers are examples of this class of the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). Here, we model the single vehicle problem as a PDTSP. We propose two heuristics with different approaches for solving the dynamic sub-problem online. The static sub-problem is solved using the farthest insertion heuristic. The first heuristic employs an insertion procedure to solve the online problem while the second uses the branch-and-cut procedure of CPLEX. The heuristics are validated using computational studies, which show that the distances travelled increases linearly with the Degree of Dynamism. The low computational times taken by the heuristics make them suitable for real-time application.

Keywords: dynamic vehicle routing; heuristics; intelligent transportation systems; partial truck loads; pickup and delivery; simulation; travelling salesman problem; TSP; express couriers; dial-a-ride systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2008.015931

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2008 Vol.4 No.1, pp.116 - 133

Published online: 02 Dec 2007 *

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