Drivers´ working hours in vehicle routing and scheduling

Although of particular importance for many real-life applications, restrictions to drivers´ working hours have only received very little attention in the vehicle routing literature. Regulations regarding drivers´ working hours often have a big impact on total travel times, i.e. the time required for driving, breaks, and rest periods. In this paper we describe the regulations for drivers´ working hours in the European Union. We present the vehicle routing problem with drivers´ working hours (VRPDWH) which generalises the well-known vehicle routing problem with time windows. We present a large neighbourhood search algorithm and test cases for the VRPDWH and conclude this paper with computational experiments