Logistics SLA optimization service for transportation in smart cities

A Service-Level Agreement (SLA) usually refers to computational services (e.g., cloud/web services), indicating contract goals and expected Quality of Service (QoS), recently extended for transportation problems called Logistics SLA. Transportation problems are being systematically studied for Smart City (SC) applications due to its huge importance: public transportation services, drone delivery services, battery recharging for electric vehicles, and also transportation for private companies considering real-time traffic information. Many of these transportations problems involve not only one-way deliveries, but also pickups, forming a set of routes with desired QoS such as maximum route length/time, delivery/pickup sequences and time windows. In order to achieve all desired QoS, while minimizing routing distances, this problem can be seen as an extension of the challenging Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), which is known to be NP-Hard. Computational intelligence strategies such as metaheuristics are often employed to find near-optimal solutions in short computational times. In this paper, we deal with a practical industrial problem involving employees transportation to a workplace in a Brazilian metropolis, involving minimization of operational costs, achievement of QoS requirements and visualization of the routes.