My PhD project focuses on developing new methods for dynamic and stochastic vehicle routing problems, having the application of multi-vehicle on-demand last-mile delivery for retail in mind. We want to develop novel routing methods such that the desired trade-off between the fleet composition, operation cost, and system performance is achieved.
This type of problems result in a complex optimization task, including stochastic and incomplete information plus needing to chose which type of vehicle should be used for each request.