Long-Haul Vehicle Routing and Scheduling with Working Hour Rules

Long-haul carriers must comply with various safety rules which are rarely taken into account in models and algorithms for vehicle routing problems. In this paper, we consider the rules on truck driver safety during long-haul trips in North America. The problem under study has two dominant features: a routing component that consists in determining the sequence of customers visited by each vehicle, and a scheduling component that consists in planning the rest periods and the service time of each customer. We have developed different scheduling algorithms embedded within a tabu search heuristic. The overall solution methods were tested on modified Solomon instances, and the computational results confirm the benefits of using a sophisticated scheduling procedure when planning long-haul transportation.