Solving the stochastic time-dependent orienteering problem with time windows

This paper introduces the stochastic time-dependent orienteering problem with time windows. The orienteering problem occurs in logistic situations where an optimal combination of locations must first be selected and then the routing between these selected locations must be optimized. In the stochastic time-dependent variant, the travel time between two locations is a stochastic function that depends on the departure time at the first location. The main contribution of this paper lies in the design of a fast and effective algorithm to solve this challenging problem. To validate the performance and the practical relevance of this proposed algorithm, several experiments were carried out on realistic benchmark instances of varying size and properties. These benchmark instances are constructed based on an actual large road network in Belgium with historic travel time profiles for every road segment.