Article ID: | iaor20072339 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 40 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 211 |
End Page Number: | 225 |
Publication Date: | May 2006 |
Journal: | Transportation Science |
Authors: | Potvin Jean-Yves, Gendreau Michel, Ichoua Soumia |
Keywords: | transportation: road, heuristics |
An important, but seldom investigated, issue in the field of dynamic vehicle routing and dispatching is how to exploit information about future events to improve decision making. In this paper, we address this issue in a real-time setting with a strategy based on probabilistic knowledge about future request arrivals to better manage the fleet of vehicles. More precisely, the new strategy introduces dummy customers (representing forecasted requests) in vehicle routes to provide a good coverage of the territory. This strategy is assessed through computational experiments performed in a simulated environment.