Distributed Decision Making in Combined Vehicle Routing and Break Scheduling

The problem of combined vehicle routing and break scheduling comprises three subproblems: clustering of customer requests, routing of vehicles, and break scheduling. In practice, these subproblems are usually solved in the interaction between planners and drivers. We consider the case that the planner performs the clustering and the drivers perform the routing and break scheduling. To analyze this problem, we embed it into the framework of distributed decision making proposed by Schneeweiss (Eur J Oper Res 150(2):237–252, 2003). We investigate two different degrees of anticipation of the drivers’ planning behaviour using computational experiments. The results indicate that in this application a more precise anticipation function results in better objective values for both the planner and the drivers.