Influence of the waiting strategy on the performance of the multi-agent approach to the DVRPTW

Abstract

A multi-agent approach to the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows has been proposed in the paper. The process of solving instances of the problem is performed by a set of software agents. They are responsible for managing the sets of dynamic requests, allocating them to the available vehicles, and optimizing the routes covered by the vehicles in order to satisfy several requests and vehicles constraints. The paper focuses on waiting strategies which aim at deciding whether a vehicle should wait after servicing a request, before heading toward the next customer. The influence of the proposed waiting strategy on the performance of the approach has been investigated via a computational experiment. It confirmed the positive impact of the strategy on the obtained results.