Dynamic Traveling Salesman Problem

Existing competitive business forces distribution firms to offer immediate services to their customers. While a static version of traveling salesman problem does not accept additional requirements of customers, a dynamic version enables dispatcher to change the planned route of the vehicle after an occurrence of on-line requests. In this paper, the minimization of the total length of travel is examined as the objective of the distribution firm with use of all available information about advance-request and immediate-request customers. Both the optimization algorithm and heuristic method are proposed to find the solution of this problem. Time windows constraints are included in extended model together with the cost function considering the travel costs and lateness costs as the penalties in case the time windows are violated. The solution to dynamic traveling salesman problem is demonstrated on generated data using LINGO as a linear programming solver and VBA in MS Excel as an interface and the output environment. Because of diversity of business activities and policies, specific model has to be formulated for each distribution firm. Possible extensions of distribution problems are indicated.