An agent-oriented approach for the dynamic vehicle routing problem

The Vehicle Routing Problem is usually treated as a static routing problem, since all information is known to the planner at the time the routing is being done. In this paper we treat a dynamic version of the problem (DVRP) where requests arrive in a dynamic way and the solution methodology must therefore be able of promptly inserting new requests in the current vehicle rides. Due to the distributed aspect of VRPs, we propose a model based on self-organisation mechanism and a multi-agent system (MAS) to model the environment. We show that our model tackles this problem by providing vehicle agents, for a new request, to make the final decision via an auction negotiation process.