Solving Capacitated Time-Dependent Vehicle Routing Problem

A vehicle routing problem aims to determine a set of vehicle routes to deliver goods to the customers. Most of the variants of the problem consider static traffic conditions, while in the real world, travel times depend on the departure time. In this paper, a capacitated time-dependent vehicle routing problem is observed, which considers time-dependent travel times between the customers, and delivery with vehicles that have limited load capacity. To solve the problem, an iterative local search metaheuristic is applied that couples the ruin-recreate principle with the common local search procedures. Several scenarios were developed to analyze the impact of time-dependent travel times on the solution quality in terms of the total travel time and customer configuration.