The construction of schedules is a key issue for motor carriers and computer-based decision support systems have a big impact on the profitability of commercial vehicle operations. If all relevant data is known a priori, schedules can be generated using static planning systems. In many real-life applications, however, relevant data change during the execution of transportation processes and schedules have to be updated dynamically.
Within this research the main differences between dynamic and static vehicle routing are identified and algorithms for dynamic vehicle routing are developed. Although some of the following characteristics of dynamic problems also apply to static planning, their impact on dynamic planning is often much more severe.