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Conventionally, vehicle routing problems are defined on a network in which the customer locations and arcs are given. Typically, these arcs somehow represent the distances or expected travel time derived from the underlying road network. When executed, the quality of the solutions obtained from the vehicle routing problem depends largely on the quality of the road network representation. This paper explicitly considers path selection in the road network as an integrated decision in the time-dependent vehicle routing problem, denoted as path flexibility (PF). This means that any arc between two customer nodes has multiple corresponding paths in the road network (geographical graph). Hence, the decisions to make are involving not only the routing decision but also the path selection decision depending upon the departure time at the customers and the congestion levels in the relevant road network. The …