Rollout Policies for Dynamic Solutions to the Multi-Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Demand and Duration Limits

We develop a family of rollout policies based on fixed routes to obtain dynamic solutions to the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demand and duration limits. In addition to a traditional one-step rollout policy, we leverage the notions of the pre- and post-decision state to distinguish two additional rollout variants, in particularly hybrid rollout. We tailor our rollout policies by developing a dynamic decomposition scheme that achieves high quality solutions to large problem instances with reasonable computational effort. Computational experiments demonstrate that our rollout policies improve upon the performance of a rolling horizon procedure and commonly employed fixed-route policies.  This talk will also present analytical bounds on the general performance of post-decision and hybrid rollout.