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