A dynamic approach for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Demands (VRPSD) is a variation of the classical Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). In contrast to the deterministic CVRP, in the VRPSD the demand of each customer is modeled as a random variable and its realization is only known upon vehicle arrival to the customer site. Under this uncertain scenario, a possible outcome is that the demand of a customer ends up exceeding the remaining capacity of the vehicle, leading to a route failure. In this study we will focus on the single vehicle VRPSD in which the fleet is limited to one vehicle with finite capacity, that can execute various routes sequentially. The present work is based on an adaptation of an optimization framework developed initially for the vehicle routing problem with dynamic customers (i.e., customers appear while the vehicles are executing their routes)