A Model for the Traveling Salesman Problem Including the EC Regulations on Driving Hours

Kopfer, Herbert; Meyer, Christoph Manuel

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-00142-0_47

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Bartodziej et al (2009) use a column generation approach and some local search based metaheuristics for solving a combined vehicle and crew scheduling problem which incorporates rest periods for drivers. Kopfer and Meyer (2009) present an integer programming model for a traveling salesman problem (TSP) which considers all relevant rules of Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 for a weekly period.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Dynamic Programming Heuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and European Community Social Legislation

Kok

Meyer

Kopfer

et al. 2010

Transportation Science

113

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In practice, apart from the problem of vehicle routing, schedulers also face the problem of finding feasible driver schedules complying with complex restrictions on drivers' driving and working hours. To address this complex interdependent problem of vehicle routing and break scheduling, we propose a restricted dynamic programming heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and the full European social legislation on drivers' driving and working hours. The problem we consider includes all rules in this legislation, whereas 1 in the literature only a basic set of rules has been addressed. In addition to this basic set of rules, the legislation contains a set of modifications that allow for more flexibility. To include the legislation in the restricted dynamic programming heuristic, we propose a break scheduling heuristic. Computational results show that our method finds solutions to benchmark instances -which only consider the basic set of rules -with 18% less vehicles and 5% less travel distance than state of the art approaches. Moreover, our results are obtained with significant less computational effort. Furthermore, the results show that including a set of rules on drivers' working hours -which has been generally ignored in the literature -has a significant impact on the resulting vehicle schedules: 3.9% more vehicle routes and 1.0% more travel distance are needed. Finally, using the modified rules of the legislation leads to an additional reduction of 4% in the number of vehicles and of 1.5% regarding the travel distance. Therefore, the modified rules should be exploited in practice.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Dynamic Programming Heuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and European Community Social Legislation

Kok

Meyer

Kopfer

et al. 2010

Transportation Science

113

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“…Meyer and Kopfer (2008c) propose a method for assigning customer time windows to weekly planning periods as a preprocessing step for solving vehicle routing and scheduling problems including the European social legislation. Kopfer and Meyer (2009) present an integer programming model for a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) which considers all relevant rules of Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 for a weekly planning period. Kopfer and Meyer (2010) develop a position based mixed-integer programming model for the VRPTW including the European social legislation.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Vehicle Routing under Consideration of Driving and Working Hours

Meyer¹

2011

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.Registered and/or industrial names, trade names, trade descriptions etc. cited in this publication are part of the law for trade-mark protection and may not be used free in any form or by any means even if this is not specifi cally marked. Based on the introduced comprehensive and full model for the compound problem of combined vehicle and break scheduling and on useful separations of the entire model, the general framework of distributed decision making is applied to the decision problem under consideration. This leads to innovative distributions of optimization tasks between dispatchers and drivers which indeed are to a VI Foreword high degree relevant for operational transportation planning processes in practice. Solving and analyzing both, the decision problem of the dispatcher and that of the drivers, and combining both problems requires the definition and application of adequate anticipation functions. Several experiments with different anticipation functions are conducted and reported in this thesis, showing the advantages and disadvantages of perfect explicit, approximate explicit and implicit anticipation. Apart from a mathematical model this thesis presents a restricted dynamic programming heuristic which solves the VRPTW-EU efficiently. By means of this heuristic, valuable experimental results could be derived which are useful for the application of the decentralized planning approach to vehicle routing.This book presents and investigates the important extension of vehicle routing and scheduling by the aspects of break scheduling according to the regulations of the European Union. It proposes approaches for solving the expanded problem and analyzes the effects of including these regulations in transportation planning.Therefore, it is an essential and helpful reading for researchers and students of logistics, particularly for those with an engineering background. In addition, the contents of this book might be very interesting for executives and software engineers in the area of transportation planning. Herbert Kopfer Preface

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“…Bartodziej et al (2009) use a column generation approach and some local search based metaheuristics for solving a combined vehicle and crew scheduling problem which incorporates rest periods for drivers. Kopfer and Meyer (2009) present an integer programming model for a TSP that considers all relevant rules of Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 for a weekly period.…”

Section: The Vrp With Driving Hours Regulationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, each driver k has to solve a traveling salesman problem with time windows and EC social legislation (TSPTW-EC) for his customer cluster CL * k . A mathematical description of this problem can be found in Kopfer and Meyer (2009) who propose a position based ILP-formulation for the TSPTW-EC.…”

Section: Planner's and Drivers' Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Congestion avoidance and break scheduling within vehicle routing

Kok¹

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Vehicle routing is a complex daily task for businesses such as logistic service providers and distribution firms. Planners have to assign many orders to many vehicles and, for each vehicle, assign a delivery sequence. The objective is to minimize total transport costs. These costs typically include the number of vehicles used and the total travel distance or time. Two general timing restrictions make vehicle routing particularly difficult: traffic congestion and driving hours regulations. As a result of traffic congestion, travel times depend on the time of departure. Therefore, vehicle routing also involves the subtask of optimizing each vehicle's departure times (both from the depot and from the customers). Driving hours regulations-which pose restrictions on driving and working times (between breaks)-have to be taken into account, making departure time optimization particularly difficult. In this research, we study the Vehicle Routing Problem under time-dependent travel times and driving hours regulations. We propose a generic solution method for Vehicle Routing Problems that can handle various restrictions, such as vehicle capacities and service time windows. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this method performs very well on problems which include driving hours regulations. Test results on Vehicle Routing Problems with traffic congestion are also very promising. Most delays caused by traffic congestion can be avoided by considering them when developing vehicle route plans. This is done by avoiding predictably busy areas during problematic hours. The solution methods proposed in this thesis are not limited to the problems they were initially designed for. We illustrate how they can be used in other studies, such as policy making, by analyzing vehicle routing from a distributed decision making perspective. In conclusion, there are various applications of the solution methods proposed in this thesis and they may allow for substantial improvements in practice.

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A Model for the Traveling Salesman Problem Including the EC Regulations on Driving Hours

Cited by 4 publications

References 2 publications

A Dynamic Programming Heuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and European Community Social Legislation

A Dynamic Programming Heuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and European Community Social Legislation

Vehicle Routing under Consideration of Driving and Working Hours

Congestion avoidance and break scheduling within vehicle routing

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