Genetic Algorithms for Vehicle Dispatching

Abstract

Decisions regarding the dispatch of transportation vehicles for servicing customer requests is mostly based on human expertise. In this paper, genetic algorithms are proposed as a means to support vehicle dispatchers in the context of a courier or express mail service. Vehicle dispatching is first modeled as a multiattribute choice problem. Then, a genetic algorithm is used to find a weighting scheme for the attributes that best reproduces the expert's decision process. Numerical results are reported on data collected from an operations day of a courier service company.