We study the strategic decision-making problem of assigning time windows to customers in the context of vehicle routing applications that are affected by operational uncertainty. This problem, known as the Time Window Assignment Vehicle Routing Problem, can be viewed as a two-stage stochastic optimization problem, where time window assignments constitute first-stage decisions, vehicle routes adhering to the assigned time windows constitute second-stage decisions, and the objective is to minimize the expected routing costs. We prove that a sampled deterministic equivalent of this stochastic model can be reduced to a variant of the Consistent Vehicle Routing Problem, and we leverage this result to develop a new scenario decomposition algorithm to solve it. From a modeling viewpoint, our approach can accommodate both continuous and discrete sets of feasible time window assignments as well as general scenario-based models of uncertainty for several routing-specific parameters, including customer demands and travel times, among others. From an algorithmic viewpoint, our approach can be easily parallelized, can utilize any available vehicle routing solver as a black box, and can be readily modified as a heuristic for large-scale instances. We perform a comprehensive computational study to demonstrate that our algorithm strongly outperforms all existing solution methods, as well as to quantify the trade-off between computational tractability and expected cost savings when considering a larger number of future scenarios during strategic time window assignment.
The multi Vehicle Routing Problem with Pickup and Delivery with Time Windows is a challenging version of the Vehicle Routing Problem. In this paper, by embedding many complex assignment routing constraints through constructing a multi dimensional network, we intend to reach optimality for local clusters derived from a reasonably large set of passengers on real world transportation networks. More specifically, we introduce a multi vehicle state space time network representation in which only the non dominated assignment based hyper paths are examined. In addition, by the aid of passengers cumul…
Managing all the mobility and transportation services with autonomous vehicles for users of a smart city requires determining the assignment of the vehicles to the users and their routing in conjunction with their speed. Such decisions must ensure low emission, efficiency, and high service quality by also considering the impact on traffic congestion caused by other vehicles in the transportation network. In this paper, we first propose an abstract trilevel multi-objective formulation architecture to model all vehicle routing problems with assignment, routing, and speed decision variables and c…
We formulate and solve the H-SARA Problem, a Vehicle Routing and Appointment Scheduling Problem motivated by home services management. We assume that travel times, service durations, and customer cancellations are stochastic. We use a two-stage process that first generates teams and routes using a VRP Solver with optional extensions and then uses an MC Scheduler that determines expected arrival times by teams at customers. We further introduce two different models of cancellation and their associated impacts on routing and scheduling. Finally, we introduce the Route Fracture Metaheuristic that…
In the Home Service Assignment, Routing, and Appointment scheduling (H-SARA) problem, a set of homogeneous service teams must visit a set of customers. The home service provider needs to decide how many teams to hire (i.e., sizing problem), how to assign service teams to customers (i.e., assignment problem), how to route service teams (i.e., vehicle routing problem),and how to schedule the appointment times for the customers (i.e., appointment scheduling problem) such that the total cost is minimized. To tackle the H-SARA problem, we propose an efficient solution method that comprises two stag…
We consider the problem of mapping a logical quantum circuit onto a given hardware with limited two-qubit connectivity. We model this problem as an integer linear program, using a network flow formulation with binary variables that includes the initial allocation of qubits and their routing. We consider several cost functions: an approximation of the fidelity of the circuit, its total depth, and a measure of cross-talk, all of which can be incorporated in the model. Numerical experiments on synthetic data and different hardware topologies indicate that the error rate and depth can be optimized…
The routing and wavelength assignment with protection is an important problem in telecommunications. Given an optical network and incoming connection requests, a commonly studied variant of the problem aims to grant maximum number of requests by assigning lightpaths at minimum network resource usage level, while ensuring the provided services remain functional in case of a single-link failure through dedicated path protection. We consider a practically relevant version where alternative lightpaths for requests are assumed to be given as a precomputed set, and show that it is NP-hard. We formul…
Xerox Research Centre India（印度施乐研究中心）；Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学泰珀商学院）；Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California（南加州大学马歇尔商学院）；Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院计算与数学科学系）
We consider the problem of vehicle routing for Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems, wherein a fleet of self-driving vehicles provides on-demand mobility in a given environment. Specifically, the task it to compute routes for the vehicles (both customer-carrying and empty travelling) so that travel demand is fulfilled and operational cost is minimized. The routing process must account for congestion effects affecting travel times, as modeled via a volume-delay function (VDF). Route planning with VDF constraints is notoriously challenging, as such constraints compound the combinatorial …
We investigate the performance of two size-based routing policies: the Size Interval Task Assignment (SITA) and Task Assignment based on Guessing Size (TAGS). We consider a system with two servers and Bounded Pareto distributed job sizes with tail parameter 1 where the difference between the size of the largest and the smallest job is finite. We show that the ratio between the mean waiting time of TAGS over the mean waiting time of SITA is unbounded when the largest job size is large and the arrival rate times the largest job size is less than one. We provide numerical experiments that show th…
Optimization of on-demand transportation systems and ride-sharing services involves solving a class of complex vehicle routing problems with pickup and delivery with time windows (VRPPDTW). This paper first proposes a new time-discretized multi-commodity network flow model for the VRPPDTW based on the integration of vehicles carrying states within space-time transportation networks, so as to allow a joint optimization of passenger-to-vehicle assignment and turn-by-turn routing in congested transportation networks. Our three-dimensional state-space-time network construct is able to comprehensiv…
KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Federal University of Ouro Preto（乌罗普雷托联邦大学）；Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro（里约热内卢天主教大学）
We investigate a structural decomposition for the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) based on vehicle-to-customer "assignment" and visits "sequencing" decision variables. We show that an heuristic search focused on assignment decisions with a systematic optimal choice of sequences (using Concorde TSP solver) during each move evaluation is promising but requires a prohibitive computational effort. We therefore introduce an intermediate search space, based on the dynamic programming procedure of Balas & Simonetti, which finds a good compromise between intensification and computational ef…
The Vehicle Fleet Sizing, Positioning and Routing Problem with Stochastic Customers (VFSPRP-SC) consists on pairing strategic decisions of depot positioning and fleet sizing with operational vehicle routing decisions while taking into account the inherent uncertainty of demand. We successfully solve the VFSPRP-SC with a methodology comprised of two main blocks: i) a scenario generation phase and ii) a two-stage stochastic program. For the first block, a set of scenarios is selected with a simulation-based approach that captures the behavior of the demand and allows us to come up with different…
After the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake, the Himalayan Disaster Relief Volunteer Group distributed supplies to affected areas. We model HDRVG's operations as a vehicle routing problem using Fisher and Jaikumar's two stage method, which allocates locations to vehicles via an integer program and then uses heuristics to route the vehicles. In the allocation stage, we use the assignment problem formulation to assign locations to vehicles. In the routing stage, we implement multiple heuristics for the sake of comparison. Our results illustrate the open nature of the vehicle routing problem and the co…
Dynamic vehicle routing problems (DVRPs) arise in several applications such as technician routing, meal delivery, and parcel shipping. We consider the DVRP with stochastic customer requests (DVRPSR), in which vehicles must be routed dynamically with the goal of maximizing the number of served requests. We model the DVRPSR as a multi-stage optimization problem, where the first-stage decision defines route plans for serving scheduled requests. Our main contributions are knapsack-based linear models to approximate accurately the expected reward-to-go, measured as the number of accepted requests, …
