A dynamic routing strategy for the real-time management of a fleet of tank trucks

The off-line-determined schedule of deliveries of fuel to filling stations often looses its efficiency because of delays owing to traffic and weather conditions, the receiving of new and urgent orders, and the temporary unavailability of some tank trucks. In this paper, a dynamic routing strategy for the real-time management of a fleet of tank trucks is proposed, with the main purpose of minimizing delays in delivering fuel. The proposed strategy relies on two in-series stages: the "trip re-scheduling" and the "trip optimization". The former considers all the trips still to be performed and assigns each of them to the tank trucks of the fleet, whereas the latter considers all the filling stations still to be served, then creates a reduced number of trips and assigns each of these trips to the tank trucks. In this paper, the mixed-integer programming formulation of the two stages are provided and described in detail.