Rich Vehicle Routing Problems

Nowadays, operational route planning has to take into account a large number of practical restrictions, which result in complex problems. Such restrictions can include complex transportation tariffs for planned routes or time window and loading restrictions. Such practical route planning problems are referred to as rich vehicle routing problems in the literature.
In addition to the consideration of complex transportation tariffs, the dissertation focuses on the consideration of loading restrictions. These can be described as a three-dimensional packing problem. In order to achieve feasible solutions of good quality, the route planning problem and the packing problem have to be solved in an integrated way. In the combination of these two challenging planning problems lies the difficulty of the task.