Vehicle routing problem of the car distribution in Central Europe

Abstract

Today's freight transport market in Central Europe is characterized by a stagnating total transport volume combined with an increasing volatility of the transport requests. At the same time, in order to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, more and more transports should be transferred from the road to more environmentally friendly transport modes. This, however, conflicts with the increasing volatility of the transport requests as a truck is more flexible in comparison to a train or a barge. In this thesis, on basis of the example of the car distribution in Central Europe we develop a model describing the underlying vehicle routing problem to be able to evaluate different fleet compositions of transport vehicles and to show up more environmentally friendly ways of transport. To solve the resulting mixed integer linear program, we present an exact optimization algorithm as well as a tabu-search heuristic. At the end of the thesis we apply both algorithms on an example case of real-world transportation data of the car distribution and compare the performance of the algorithms.