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

This paper studies a version of stochastic vehicle routing problems, in which travel and service times are stochastic, and a time window constraint is associated with each customer. This problem is originally formulated as a chance constrained programming model and a stochastic programming model with recourse in terms of different optimization criteria. To efficiently solve these two models, a heuristic based on tabu search, which takes into account the stochastic nature of this problem, is then proposed. Finally, some testing instances with different properties are established to investigate the algorithmic performance, and the computational results are then reported. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.