Emerging information based technologies including, Intelligent Transport Systems {US), Geographic Information Systems {GIS), Global Position Systems (GPS) provide powerful tools for increasing the efficiency as well as reducing the impacts of goods movement in urban areas. These technologies when integrated with optimisation techniques also have the potential to improve the safety and reliability of urban freight systems. Vehicle routing and scheduling is a central problem in fleet management. The vehicle routing and scheduling problem is an optimisation process where a set of customers are assigned to trucks and the visiting order of customers are determined to minimise delivery costs. Since this is a NP-hard problem, heuristic techniques must be used to find good solutions within a reasonable time. This paper will outline a new heuristic method for solving the vehicle routing and scheduling problem and show how it can be integrated with GIS and GPS to provide a Commercial Vehicle Management System (CVMS). (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E206301.
Samenvatting