Efficient Optimization of Supply Tours with Time Windows

Researchers, Partners, and Funding

• Researchers:
  • Dr. Andreas Baltz
  • Dipl.-Math. Mourad El Ouali
  • Carsten Krapp
  • Dipl.-Math. Volkmar Sauerland
  • Prof. Dr. Anand Srivastav
• Cooperation Partner:
  • FLS Fuhrpark & Logistik Systeme GmbH
• Funded by:
  • Innovationsstiftung Schleswig-Holstein and Ministry of science, economy, and transport
  • Program: Hochschule – Wirtschaft – Transfer

Project Description

Efficient tour planning is a major task in transportation science and a decisive factor of economic success in view of the dramatically increasing costs that impend today's transportation system. Since the inherent complexity of the task hinders the development of provably optimal solution methods, conventional automatic planning tools resort to heuristics with unknown performance guarantees.

In cooperation with FLS - one of Germany's leading software companies in the field of logistics,transport, and supply management - we study the usability of methods from combinatorial discrete mathematics that have proven successful for variants of the famous NP-hard traveling salesman problem.

The project is funded by the Innovationsstiftung Schleswig-Holstein within the framework of the support program Hochschule – Wirtschaft – Transfer (academy – economy – transfer) from 9/2005 – 12/2006.