The Synchronized Dynamic Vehicle Dispatching Problem

This paper solves a particular class of Real Time Vehicle Dispatching Problems where there is need to service some customers with multiple resources subject to synchronization constraints. Real world applications are presented and a flexible heuristic based on Constraint Programming is proposed. In order to facilitate future comparisons, benchmark instances are derived from well‐known vehicle routing benchmark instances and a transformation method is detailed. Results on instances containing up to 1000 requests show that solutions are sensitive to the number of synchronization constraints as well as to the requests’ arrival rate.