Design, Operations, & Production Systems Lab (DeOPSys) |
I. Minis, K. Mamasis, V. Zeimpekis
Real-Time Management of Vehicle Breakdowns in Urban Freight Distribution, under review in Journal of Heuristics, 2010
This paper deals with situations in which an unexpected event immobilizes a vehicle of a distribution fleet permanently, and the remaining vehicles are rerouted to serve some of the clients of the failed vehicle. We model this problem as a variation of the Team Orienteering Problem (TOP), constraining all vehicle routes to an upper time, or distance, limit. The problem requires an effective solution in almost real time. We propose a new heuristic to provide efficient solutions within this strict computational time constraint. To test the quality of the heuristic, we have developed and validated a Genetic Algorithm (GA) that obtains high quality (but computationally expensive) solutions and compare them to those obtained by the heuristic. The latter has also been tested successfully in a real-time fleet management system.
Keywords: Team Orienteering Problem, Freight Distribution, Distribution Vehicle Breakdown, Vehicle Routing, City Logistics