A SOLUTION PROCEDURE FOR REAL-TIME ROUTING AND DISPATCHING OF COMMERCIAL VEHICLES

Abstract

Many distributions systems involve the real-time dispatch of a fleet of commercial vehicles for serving customer requests. Typical examples include courier services or less-than-truckload trucking, where vehicle routes must be determined quickly or in real-time. This paper describes an efficient solution procedure, based on the tabu search heuristic, to determine near-optimal solutions in two different problem settings: real-time routing where all customer locations are known before hand but at short notice, and real-time dispatching where requests are received and must be responded to in an on-going fashion. To provide quick response time, the solution procedure is implemented in a course-grain parallel computing environment. Computational results indicate that high-quality solutions are produced in acceptable time.