Joint Vehicle and Crew Routing and Scheduling

Traditional vehicle routing problems implicitly assume only one crew operates a vehicle for the entirety of its journey. However, this assumption is violated in many applications arising in humanitarian and military logistics. This paper considers a Joint Vehicle and Crew Routing and Scheduling Problem, in which crews are able to interchange vehicles, resulting in space and time interdependencies between vehicle routes and crew routes. It proposes a constraint programming model that overlays crew routing constraints over a standard vehicle routing problem. The constraint programming model uses a novel optimization constraint that detects infeasibility and bounds crew objectives. Experimental results demonstrate significant benefits of using constraint programming over mixed integer programming and a vehicle-then-crew sequential approach.

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