Event based dynamic multi-facility vehicle routing model

Abstract

The term 'Industry 4.0' mark the evolution of Information and Communication Technologies that promoted technological changes enabling modern supply chain logistics systems to work efficiently in a dynamic environment. Industry 4.0 emphasises on interconnected systems through the application of the latest technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), and in this research, these systems are assumed to be deployed which provides a channel for real-time information transfer between the dispatcher and vehicles allowing the logistic system the possibility of reacting to dynamic events such as new service requests and dropouts. This paper focuses on a variant of VRP, the capacitated multi-depot vehicle routing problem which takes into consideration the dynamic nature of the system. Since the VRP is NP-hard, a new 2 stage algorithm is introduced that make use of different combinations of various heuristics and local search metaheuristics to generate high-quality solutions that may not be optimal in a very short time. The proposed methodology creates an initial route plan for the predetermined requests and then modifies the original plan as new events are dynamically revealed over time. Results are collected, and the performance of different algorithms are compared in a dynamic setting.