Dynamic Vehicle Routing in Over Congested Urban Areas

The solution of dynamic vehicle routing problems has evolved rapidly in the past years due to the development of telecommunication and information technologies. Traffic information systems have been installed in large cities of the world with the objective of reducing the negative effects of bottlenecks in street networks. In developing countries, however, the large investments to install such systems often forbid its extensive use. By analyzing a simple urban routing problem, subject to unexpected and frequent traffic jams, we show with the aid of Sequential Analysis concepts that even under limited technological resources it is possible to obtain significant benefits when adopting a dynamic strategy to handle vehicle routing problems.