Dynamic Vehicle Routing under Uncertain Travel Costs and Refueling Opportunities

Abstract

We study the vehicle routing problem for a system where there is some uncertainty regarding both the cost of travel and the refueling opportunities. Travel cost stands for the energy spent by the vehicle to move between locations. Refueling opportunities are offered at known locations where the vehicle can harvest or re-gain some of the lost energy. The objective is to visit a set of predefined locations without exhausting the energy of the vehicle. We describe the problem in a formal way, and propose a heuristic algorithm for taking routing decisions at runtime. We evaluate the algorithm for a grid topology as a function of the number of locations to be visited and the autonomy degree of the vehicle, showing that the proposed algorithm achieves good results as long as the energy margins are not very tight.