Regulations regarding drivers' working hours often have a big impact on total transit times, i.e., the time required for driving periods, breaks, and rest periods. Although of particular importance for many real-life applications, they have received only very little attention in the vehicle routing literature. This paper describes the new regulations for drivers' working hours in the European Union that entered into force in April 2007. According to the new regulations, motor carriers must organise the work of drivers in such a way that drivers are able to comply with the respective regulations and are made liable for infringements committed by the drivers. This paper shows how motor carriers can schedule driving periods, breaks, rest periods, and handling activities, and presents a large neighbourhood search algorithm capable of generating vehicle tours complying with the new regulations.
In this paper, we study a rich vehicle routing problem incorporating various complexities found in real-life applications. The General Vehicle Routing Problem (GVRP) is a combined load acceptance and generalised vehicle routing problem. Among the real-life requirements are time window restrictions, a heterogeneous vehicle fleet with different travel times, travel costs and capacity, multi-dimensional capacity constraints, order/vehicle compatibility constraints, orders with multiple pickup, delivery and service locations, different start and end locations for vehicles, and route restrictions for vehicles. The GVRP is highly constrained and the search space is likely to contain many solutions such that it is impossible to go from one solution to another using a single neighbourhood structure. Therefore, we propose iterative improvement approaches based on the idea of changing the neighbourhood structure during the search.
Since April 2007 working hours of truck drivers in the European Union are controlled by regulation (EC) No. 561/2006. According to the new regulation, road transport undertakings must organise the work of drivers in a way that drivers are able to comply with the regulations and can be made liable for infringements committed by the drivers. Although of particular importance in long-distance haulage, regulations on working hours of truck drivers have received very little attention in the scheduling literature. This paper presents a method for scheduling driving and working hours of truck drivers with respect to regulation (EC) No. 561/2006. Given a sequence of locations to be visited within specified time windows, the approach is guaranteed to find a schedule complying with the regulation if such a schedule exists.
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