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Tuesday, July 11, 13:45-14:30 (Room 02A00)

Chairman: Prof. Maria Grazia Speranza (University of Brescia)

"Solving Vehicle Routing Problems Using Excel"

Speaker: Dr. Gunes Erdogan

Reader in Management Science; Director of Studies MSc in Business Analytics

School of Management, University of Bath

In this tutorial, we will show how to solve Vehicle Routing Problems using VRP Spreadsheet Solver, an Excel workbook with embedded VBA functions to acquire location and distance data from a GIS, solve the problem instance, and display the solution on a map. We will present challenges and associated practical solutions regarding the VRP solution process including the acquisition of GIS data, scenario analyses, and visualization. We will demonstrate the use of a solver on a real-world instance and conclude with future directions for VRP software design.

Tuesday, July 11, 14:30-15:15 (Room 02A00)

Chairman: Prof. Richard Hartl (University of Vienna)

"Routing Electric Vehicles: Problem Variants, Methods, and Future Challenges"

Prof. Michael Schneider

Deutsche Post Chair of Optimization of Distribution Networks

School of Business and Economics, RWTH Aachen University

Electric commercial vehicles (ECVs) have several advantages compared to internal combustion commercial vehicles, like no local greenhouse gas and only minimal noise emissions, but they are still not competitive from a cost point of view. One important aspect in paving the way for their long-term success is their cost-efficient operation in last-mile delivery operations. This entails the investigation of so-called electric vehicle-routing problems (EVRPs), which cover the limited driving range of ECVs and the possibility of recharging their battery at charging stations along the route. In this talk, we give an overview of the variants of ECVs treated in the literature, and we describe important components of successful heuristic solution approaches. In particular, we propose to consider EVRPs as a special variant of VRPs with intermediate stops and to concentrate on the development of more general solution frameworks for this class of problems. Finally, we outline interesting topics for future research.