Real-Time Dispatching of Guided and Unguided Automobile Service Units with Soft Time Windows

We investigate a real-world large scale vehicle dispatching problem with strict real-time requirements, posed by our cooperation partner, the German Automobile Association. We present computational experience on real-world data with a dynamic column generation method employing a portfolio of acceleration techniques. Our computer program ZIBDIP yields solutions on heavy-load real-world instances (215 service requests, 95 service units) in less than a minute that are no worse than 1% from optimum on state-of-the-art personal computers.