Article ID: | iaor20132694 |
Volume: | 204 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 171 |
End Page Number: | 187 |
Publication Date: | Apr 2013 |
Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
Authors: | Ibaraki Toshihide, Yagiura Mutsunori, Hashimoto Hideki, Imahori Shinji |
Keywords: | literature survey, time windows |
Vehicle routing and scheduling problems have a wide range of applications and have been intensively studied in the past half century. The condition that enforces each vehicle to start service at each customer in the period specified by the customer is called the time window constraint. This paper reviews recent results on how to handle hard and soft time window constraints, putting emphasis on its different definitions and algorithms. With these diverse time windows, the problem becomes applicable to a wide range of real‐world problems.