Truck routing and scheduling

The problem is part of a complex software solution for truck itinerary construction for one of the largest public road transportation companies in the EU. In practice a minor improvement on the operational cost per tour can decide whether a freight services company is profitable or not. Thus the optimization of routes has key importance in the operation of such companies. Given an initial location and an asset state one must be able to calculate a cost optimal itinerary containing all Point of Interests. Such an itinerary is an executable plan which exactly specifies the location and activity of an asset during the whole timespan of the itinerary. If parking places and gas stations are included in the planning then it is NP hard to find an optimal solution. This means that for long range tours an approximately optimal solution for refueling has to be given within an acceptable running time. Also the corridoring of the trucks is an important problem so that we try to optimize the performance, hence tours cannot be recalculated at each data arrival. The vehicle assignment part of this work is already finished and applied with very good results. The remaining part is subject of an ongoing research which started at January 2014. The company started to apply and test our product in the beginning of 2015 under increased human supervision. As a consequence of the project a large cost saving is anticipated by the company.