Sustainable Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Travelling Times and Demands : A Simulation-Optimisation Approach

Different sustainability dimensions have been proposed in the scientific literature to quantify the economic, environmental, and social impacts of transport activities. Besides, real-life transport operations are often subject to uncertainty in travelling times or in customers’ demands. Hence, analysing the effect of these uncertainties on the economic, environmental, and social costs of vehicle routing plans is of upmost importance for managers and policy makers. Accordingly, this paper addresses the Sustainable Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Travelling times and Demands. The paper provides a formal description of the problem, and proposes the use of recourse strategies to deal with unexpected events such as route failures. To solve this challenging problem, we propose a simheuristic algorithm that makes use of biased-randomised techniques combined with an iterated greedy framework, which also includes a local search (Sim-BRIG-LS). An extensive set of computational experiments has been conducted to evaluate the proposed Sim-BRIG-LS approach and analyse the influence of stochastic components on the different sustainable dimensions