A Microsimulation Based Analysis of Exact Solution of Dynamic Vehicle Routing with Soft Time Windows

Abstract

This paper presents a microsimulation-based evaluation of an exact solution approach for the soft time windows variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) that also considers penalties on the late arrival. The exact solution approach of the Dynamic Vehicle Routing and scheduling Problem with Soft Time Windows (D-VRPSTW) is based on the column generation (Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition) scheme; whereas VISSIM has been used to simulate the traffic network under normal as well as under traffic incident conditions. Evaluations shows that the D-VRPSTW helps in avoiding additional cost as well as lateness for the freight carriers, caused due to an unexpected change in travel times along the roads.