Vehicle routing in the case of uncertain customer demands and soft time windows: A neuro-fuzzy logic approach

Abstract

Vehicle routing, with its many variants, is one of the most important and frequently solved problems in transportation engineering. The aim of this paper is to develop a decision-making support tool for addressing the issue of dispatching vehicles in scenarios characterized by uncertain demands within soft time windows. In real-world scenarios, it is not uncommon for customer demands to exhibit flexibility, where certain early arrivals or delays may be deemed acceptable. Therefore, this paper introduces vehicle routing in more realistic contexts, offering potential practical implementations. The methodology for solving the problem is based on a fuzzy logic system whose membership functions are additionally adjusted using a neural network. Such a tool, neuro-fuzzy logic, is suitable for solving a defined routing problem since it can consider all the mentioned uncertainties in the distribution systems. Each user is assigned a performance index that considers travel time, demand, and delivery time windows. Then, the performance index is used as input data in the proposed vehicle routing tool based on the Clarke-Wright algorithm. The described approach has been tested on a concrete example, mimicking a distribution network resembling real world conditions, incorporating estimated travel times between customers. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively handle customer demands, with an average delay of 5.05 minutes during the 80-minute distribution. In future research, some environmental factors could be included in the proposed model. In addition, one of the directions of future research could be vehicle re-routing using the ideas from this paper.