Drivers’ Autonomy for Planning Breaks and Rest Periods in Vehicle Routing

This paper analyses the planning problem of including breaks and rest periods in vehicle routes and schedules from a conceptual point of view. The relevant legal restrictions for drivers’ driving and working hours are presented and their impact on vehicle routing is shown. Consequently the overall planning problem is decomposed into three subproblems: clustering of customer requests, scheduling of vehicles and the rest periods planning. These subproblems can be solved either simultaneously or in sequence with the possibility of solving two of the three tasks simultaneously. Moreover in sequential approaches the planning tasks are usually divided between two decision making units, namely the scheduler and the driver. Therefore the decision situation in the sequential approaches is characterized by hierarchies in distributed decision making. These decision situations are analysed from a conceptual perspective.