Common Contracts

Publication agreement

May 18th, 2009

• Filed
  May 18th, 2009

In the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), not considering ferries when ferries are in fact present could cause the solution to be very inaccurate and very di cult to implement. As the travel time between two locations, when ferries are present, is dependent on the departure time, not considering ferries is in fact solving the wrong problem. This thesis focuses on the advantages of considering ferries in a VRP, as well as documenting the extra computational e ort needed. We present an approach towards ferries using a set of travel times for each origin - destination pair containing one or more ferries. The travel times are calculated for departure times of chosen intervals using intermediate times to and from the ferry connections. Results show that considering ferries yield substantial improvements when implementing the route plans, in comparison to a standard VRP solver using static travel times.