Heuristics are here to help your online vehicle scheduling

An application of real-time changes in scheduling deliveries of road-making materials is conducted based on an implementation of a tabu search heuristic. This distribution problem deals with heterogeneous products and vehicles where the assignment of pickup points to requests needs also to be made. The problem is investigated as a full-load pickup and delivery problem with time windows. Online as well as offline experiments based on real data from a construction company in the United Kingdom are reported and discussed. Various practical issues that arise in this real-time logistical problem are also discussed and analysed. Interesting and encouraging results are reported.