Towards Real-Time Fleet-Event-Handling for the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach to real-time fleet event handling for the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem based on evolutionary computation. For this purpose, a communication protocol between a fleet of vehicles and an optimization back-end is presented and the related changes to the evolutionary algorithm are illustrated. This allows for information exchange and event-handling in real-time. Furthermore, this paper describes the adaption of benchmark files for the static Vehicle Routing Problem to a dynamic real-time scenario including time-dependent travel times, as well as dynamic travel and service times. The adapted benchmark files are then used for the evaluation of the proposed system.