The Considered RDOPG Applications

In this chapter, the problem of coordinating transportation processes of RDOPG applications in real-time is described in detail. One of the main characteristics which distinguishes RDOPG applications from several other dynamic routing applications is the objective function of minimizing customer inconvenience. Customer inconvenience directly starts upon arrival of a customer request in the system and hence can be distinguished from penalty costs which only occur if a request is serviced late. According to results from the marketing literature, customer inconvenience is modeled as a linear and a quadratic function. Moreover, a maximum allowed response time is defined in order to avoid an indefinite deferment of individual customer requests. Other important aspects of the considered problem are presented. Specifically, vehicles move on a real road network and vehicle en-route diversion is allowed during the execution of the transportation process. The availability of past request information allows for the application of appropriate forecasting methods for generating stochastic knowledge out of it. After the problem description, various attributes of the considered RDOPG applications, including their problem complexity, are described. Finally, RDOPG applications are characterized according to classifications proposed in Chap. 2.