Dynamic vehicle routing: Solution methods and computational tools

Within the wide scope of logistics management,transportation plays a central role and is a crucialactivity in both production and service industry.Among others, it allows for the timely distributionof goods and services between suppliers, productionunits, warehouses, retailers, and final customers.More specifically, Vehicle Routing Problems(VRPs) deal with the design of a set of minimal costroutes that serve the demand for goods orservices of a set of geographically spread customers,satisfying a group of operational constraints.While it was traditionally a static problem, recenttechnological advances provide organizations withthe right tools to manage their vehicle fleet in realtime. Nonetheless, these new technologies alsointroduce more complexity in fleet managementtasks, unveiling the need for decision support systemsdedicated to dynamic vehicle routing. In thiscontext, the contributions of this Ph.D. thesis arethreefold : (i) it presents a comprehensive reviewof the literature on dynamic vehicle routing ; (ii)it introduces flexible optimization frameworks thatcan cope with a wide variety of dynamic vehiclerouting problems ; (iii) it defines a new vehicle routingproblem with numerous applications.