On the Value and Challenge of Real-Time Information in Dynamic Dispatching of Service Vehicles

Ubiquitous computing technologies and information systems pave the way for real-time planning and management. In the process of dynamic vehicle dispatching, the adherent challenge is to develop decision support systems using real-time information in an appropriate quality and at the right moment in order to improve their value creation. As real-time information enables replanning at any point in time, the question arises when replanning should be triggered. Frequent replanning may lead to efficient routing decisions due to vehicles’ diversions from current routes while less frequent replanning may enable effective assignments due to gained information. In this paper, the authors analyze and quantify the impact of the three main triggers from the literature, exogenous customer requests, endogenous vehicle statuses, and replanning in fixed intervals, for a dynamic vehicle routing problem with stochastic service requests. To this end, the authors generalize the Markov-model of an established dynamic routing problem and embed the different replanning triggers in an existing anticipatory assignment and routing policy. They particularly analyze under which conditions each trigger is advantageous. The results indicate that fixed interval triggers are inferior and dispatchers should focus either on the exogenous customer process or the endogenous vehicle process. It is further shown that the exogenous trigger is advantageous for widely spread customers with long travel durations and few dynamic requests while the endogenous trigger performs best for many dynamic requests and when customers are accumulated in clusters.