A performance evaluation of vehicle routing heuristic in a stochastic environment

The stochastic vehicle routing problem (SVRP) is a problem of growing importance since it includes a reality that the classical VRP does not have. The solution methods for the SVRP are very intricate and regarded as computationally intractable. Even good heuristics are hard to design and apply. One possible way of solving the SVRP is to apply an effective and efficient solution method for the VRP. This paper presents a computational study on the performance of four simple vehicle routing heuristics in a stochastic environment where vehicle travel time and customer service quantity are varying. The four heuristics are modified to consider the time window constraints. The computational results show that some of them perform very well in a stochastic environment.