Agent-based dispatching in groupage traffic

The complexity and dynamics in group age traffic requires flexible, efficient, and adaptive planning and controlling processes. While the general problem refers to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), additional requirements have to be fulfilled in application. Individual properties and priorities of orders, a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles, dynamically incoming orders, unexpected events etc. require a proactive and reactive system behavior. To enable automated dispatching processes, we have implemented a multiagent system where the decision making is shifted from a central system to autonomous, interacting, intelligent agents. To evaluate the approach we used multi agent-based simulation and modeled several scenarios on real world infrastructures with orders provided by our industrial partner. The results reveal that agent-based dispatching meets the increasing requirements in groupage traffic while supporting the combination of pickup and delivery tours and accommodating request priorities, time-windows, as well as capacity constraints.