Travel Time Estimation in Vehicle Routing Problem

Vehicle routing is a well-known problem in operations research. The problem aims to find an optimal route for vehicles touring all customer locations. Travel time is one of objectives in vehicle routing problem(VRP). The travel time of a route is the sum of travel times between two customers in the route. In reality, there are multiple road segments between two customer sites. Thus, probability distribution of travel time between two customers can be derived by the convolution of distributions of road segments within the arc of two locations. This paper suggests a method of estimation of travel time of the arc in the network of VRP. An example addresses how the method applies to estimate the distribution of the travel time.