On profitableness of considering dynamics in forwarding agencies

Pickup and Delivery Problems, where customers may both receive and send goods, are an extension to classical Vehicle Routing Problems. We do not make the assumption common in literature that goods may only be picked up after all deliveries have been completed. Thereby we model industry problems encountered by freight forwarding agencies, which have to deal with dynamic pickups and deliveries in an integrated manner. The approach we take evaluates the benefits of dynamic optimization anticipating varying travel times as well as unknown customer orders in the specific environment of freight forwarding agencies. On test instances with customer distributions common in forwarding industries single depot problems are analyzed with very encouraging results.