Estimating the effects of access time windows in the management of urban delivery fleets

The analyses prior to the introduction of access time window policies in the centre of European cities often neglect the evaluation of the extra costs imposed on carriers through the additional number of vehicles required and the increase in tour length. To facilitate this evaluation, we have developed a vehicle routing algorithm that takes into account the existence of access time windows and adapts tours in the best possible manner to this restriction. The algorithm is based on a Genetic Algorithm, which we use to make this evaluation through the analysis of several experiments in a test network.