This PhD thesis is carried out in collaboration between the LIRIS and Béton Direct, a company which specializes in the sale of ready-mixed concrete. The company is proposing a new
delivery method for concrete, using small containers (500 liter bins).
This new method is a three-step process :
1. A vehicle delivers empty bins to the customer ;
2. With this, a mixer truck goes to fill the bins ;
3. The next day, a vehicle picks up empty bins.
If bins are totally empty and clean when they are picked up from a customer, they could be directly delivered to another customer. Otherwise, they should be routed to a recycling center.
Thus, the uncertainty created by the condition of each recovered bin, which is unknown in advance, involve dealing with dynamic vehicle routing.
Our objective in this work is to develop a decision support system to build and coordinate dynamic and efficient routes for vehicles transporting bins and those transporting concrete.
Hence, we will have to develop methods to build and synchronize two different types of dynamic vehicle routes (pickup/delivery routes for bins, and delivery routes for concrete).
To the best of our knowledge, there is no work in the literature dealing with the synchronization of two types of vehicle tours in a dynamic context. Furthermore, some particular constraints, especially those related to concrete (the duration of use, the need for recycling...) give further originality to our problem.