Vehicle routing problem and driver behaviour: a review and framework for analysis

ABSTRACT

Vehicle routing problems (VRPs) whose typical objective is to minimise total travel costs over a tour have evolved over the years with objectives ranging from minimising travel times and distances to minimising pollution and fuel consumption. However, driver behaviour continues to be neglected while planning for vehicle routes. Factors such as traffic congestion levels, monotonous drives and fatigue have an impact on the behaviour of drivers, which in turn might affect their speed-choice and route-choice behaviours. The behaviour of drivers and their subsequent decision-making owing to these factors impact the revenue of transport companies and could lead to huge losses in extreme cases. There have been studies on the behaviour of drivers in isolation, without inclusion of the objectives and constraints of the traditional routing problem. This paper presents a review of existing models of VRP, planner behaviour models in the VRP context and driver behaviour models and provides a motivation to integrate these models in a stochastic traffic environment to produce practical, economic and driver-friendly logistics solutions. The paper provides valuable insights on the relevance of behavioural issues in logistics and highlights the modelling implications of incorporating planner and driver behaviour in the framework of routing problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Vehicle routing problem
• driver behaviour
• planner behaviour
• route-choice
• speed-choice
• logistics

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Prof. T.T. Narendran for the feedback, support and encouragement. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, which helped us to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.