The Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem

The subject of the thesis is to investigate the dynamic version of the well-known vehicle routing problem in order to improve the performance of existing algorithms as well as to develop new algorithms. I would like to express my gratitude to Transportrådet for their belief and interest in this project. Next, I would like to thank my thesis advisor, professor Oli B.G. Madsen, for his support and interest through this project. I have now served as Oli's master student, teaching/research assistant and lately as his Ph.D.-student for more than five years and I have enjoyed working with Oli from the very first day. I would also like to thank professor Marius M. Solomon of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, for our collaboration on the technical report first presented at the Tristan III conference in Puerto Rico in 1998 and for providing good comments on and ideas for chapter 4 and 5. European Club at M.I.T. are thanked for making my stay in the US such a memorable experience. I also wish to thank my old colleague Karsten Lund for his persistency and devotion while getting his old code tuned for my new data. Along the same line Rene Munk Jørgensen is thanked for writing the software for finding the coordinates of the real-life problem presented in the thesis. Søren Andersen and his colleagues at United Parcel Services are thanked for answering my endless number of questions as well as allowing me to use their data for a real-life data analysis. Also, the staff-the academic as well as the administrative-at the Department of Mathematical Modelling (IMM) should be thanked for their friendly attitude. I have indeed enjoyed being a student and an employee at the Department from day one. Especially, my fellow members of the Operations Research Cake Group (ORCG) are thanked for providing more than the calories needed in order to perform the research of this thesis. Lisbeth Mohr is thanked for her big effort in listing the numerous typos and bad structured sentences in the preliminary version of the thesis. Finally, I would like to thank my family, friends and last but certainly not least my girlfriend Camilla for all their love and support throughout the three years it took to prepare this thesis. Summary During recent years distribution systems have become increasingly complex. This development is partly due to the high number of company mergers which leave distribution …