Problem transformations for vehicle routing and scheduling in the European Union

Abstract

In the European Union working hours of truck drivers must comply with regulation (EC) No 561/2006 which entered into force in April 2007. The regulation has a significant impact on travel times including the driving time and the time required for compulsory breaks and rest periods. Recently, several approaches for solving vehicle routing and scheduling problems have been proposed in which European Union legislation must be complied with. All of these approaches restrict the application domain by constraining the maximum amounts of driving time and working time by the "weekly" limits of 56 hours and 60 hours imposed by regulation (EC) No 561/2006. In this paper it is shown that the amounts of driving time and working time a driver may accumulate within a period of six days can be significantly higher due to inconsistent definitions in the regulation. Problem transformation rules are presented which can be embedded in the previously developed approaches to exploit these inconsistencies. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.