Vehicle Routing Problems with Fuel Consumption and Stochastic Travel Speeds

Conventional vehicle routing problems (VRP) always assume that the vehicle travel speed is fixed or time-dependent on arcs. However, due to the uncertainty of weather, traffic conditions, and other random factors, it is not appropriate to set travel speeds to fixed constants in advance. Consequently, we propose a mathematic model for calculating expected fuel consumption and fixed vehicle cost where average speed is assumed to obey normal distribution on each arc which is more realistic than the existing model. For small-scaled problems, we make a linear transformation and solve them by existing solver CPLEX, while, for large-scaled problems, an improved simulated annealing (ISA) algorithm is constructed. Finally, instances from real road networks of England are performed with the ISA algorithm. Computational results show that our ISA algorithm performs well in a reasonable amount of time. We also find that when taking stochastic speeds into consideration, the fuel consumption is always larger than that with fixed speed model.