Due to the complexity of urban area, the city vehicle routing problem has been a difficult problem. The problem has involved factors such as parking availability, road conditions, and traffic congestion, all of which increase transportation costs and delivery times. To resolve this problem, one effective solution can be the use of parcel lockers located near customer sites, where products are stored for customers to pick up. When a vehicle delivers products to a designated parcel locker, customers in the vicinity must pick up their products from that locker. Recently, identifying optimal locations for these parcel lockers has become an important research issue. This paper addresses the parcel locker location problem within the context of urban traffic congestion. By considering dynamic environmental factors, we propose a Markov decision process model to tackle the city vehicle routing problem. To ensure more real situations, we have used optimal paths for distances between two nodes. Numerical results demonstrate the viability of our model and solution strategy.

The Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem (DVRP) involves a combinatorial optimization problem where new customer demands become known over time, and old routes must be reconfigured to generate new routes while executing the current solution. We consider the high level of dynamism problem. An application of highly dynamic DVRP is the ambulance service where a patient contacts the service center, followed by an evaluation of case severity, and a visit by a practitioner/ ambulance is scheduled accordingly. This paper considers a variant of the DVRP and proposes a decentralized algorithm in which collaborators (Depot and Vehicle), both have only partial information about the entire system. The DVRP is modeled as a periodic re optimization of VRP using the proposed decentralized algorithm where collaborators exchange local information to achieve the best global objective for the current state of the system. We assume the existence of a dispatcher e.g., headquarter of the company who can communicate to vehicles in order to gather information and assigns the new visits to them. The effectiveness of the proposed decentralized coordination algorithm is further evaluated using benchmark data given in literature. The results show that the proposed method performed better than the compared algorithms which utilize the centralized coordination in 12 out of 21 benchmark problems.