In the urban freight transportation, many customers require deliveries with strict time windows. When the time windows imposed by customers are changed to some extent, the total transportation costs can be potentially reduced significantly. The vehicle routing method accompanied with the adjustment of time windows is considered. A time window moderation model was introduced in addition to the vehicle routing data model that was developed in previous research. Based on these data models, the simulated annealing procedure is adopted to obtain solutions. Computational experiments are conducted to show the efficiency of this method. For the covering abstract see ITRD E114174.
Abstract