Swartz, P. G., Duyckaerts, G., and Salani, M. (2009)

Ambush avoidance in Vehicle Routing for valuable delivery

In this work we consider route planning for valuable delivery in an urban environment under the threat of ambushes in which a vehicle, starting from a depot, has to serve a set of predetermined destinations during the day. We provide a method to plan for hardly predictable multi-destination routing extending a minmax flow-based model available for single-destination cases. We then formulate the process of selecting a visiting order as a game to obtain a mixed routing strategy. We analyse the application of the method to a set of simulation scenarios and compare the mixed routing strategy against the best routing. Finally we develop further the methodology introducing a second-level optimization model which reduces the overall risk associated to the proposed mixed routing strategy.