Vehicle routing problems with time windows and stochastic times: Models and algorithm

This paper studies a version of the stochastic vehicle routing problem, where travel and service times are stochastic, and a time window is associated with each customer. This problem is originally formulated as a chance constrained programming and a stochastic programming with recourse in terms of different optimization objectives. To efficiently solve these two models, a tabu search heuristic is then proposed, which takes into account the stochastic nature of this problem. Finally, some testing instances with different properties are established to investigate the algorithmic performance and computational results are reported.