An improved agent-based approach to the dynamic vehicle routing problem

Abstract

The paper proposes a multi-agent approach to the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem, where the process of solving instances of the problem is performed by a set of software agents with different abilities. The agents are responsible for generating new requests, managing a set of requests, allocating them to the available vehicles, and monitoring the behavior of the system. The main steps of the algorithm implemented in the system include dispatching the static and dynamic requests to the available vehicles. In order to increase the efficiency of these processes, a request buffering strategy has been implemented. Computational experiment confirmed its positive impact on the results obtained by the proposed approach.