Routing Optimization Under Uncertainty
Author(s)
Jaillet, Patrick; Qi, Jin; Sim, Melvyn
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We consider a class of routing optimization problems under uncertainty in which all decisions are made before the uncertainty is realized. The objective is to obtain optimal routing solutions that would, as much as possible, adhere to a set of specified requirements after the uncertainty is realized. These problems include finding an optimal routing solution to meet the soft time window requirements at a subset of nodes when the travel time is uncertain, and sending multiple capacitated vehicles to different nodes to meet the customers’ uncertain demands. We introduce a precise mathematical framework for defining and solving such routing problems. In particular, we propose a new decision criterion, called the Requirements Violation (RV) Index, which quantifies the risk associated with the violation of requirements taking into account both the frequency of violations and their magnitudes whenever they occur. The criterion can handle instances when probability distributions are known, and ambiguity when distributions are partially characterized through descriptive statistics such as moments. We develop practically efficient algorithms involving Benders decomposition to find the exact optimal routing solution in which the RV Index criterion is minimized, and we give numerical results from several computational studies that show the attractive performance of the solutions.
Date issued
2016-01Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
Operations Research
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Citation
Jaillet, Patrick et al. “Routing Optimization Under Uncertainty.” Operations Research 64, 1 (February 2016): 186–200 © 2016 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISSN
0030-364X
1526-5463