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Vehicle routing with multiple deliverymen: Modeling and heuristic approaches for the VRPTW

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  • Pureza, Vitória
  • Morabito, Reinaldo
  • Reimann, Marc

Abstract

In real life distribution of goods, relatively long service times may make it difficult to serve all requests during regular working hours. These difficulties are even greater if the beginning of the service in each demand site must occur within a time window and violations of routing time restrictions are particularly undesirable. We address this situation by considering a variant of the vehicle routing problem with time windows for which, besides routing and scheduling decisions, a number of extra deliverymen can be assigned to each route in order to reduce service times. This problem appears, for example, in the distribution of beverage and tobacco in highly dense Brazilian urban areas. We present a mathematical programming formulation for the problem, as well as a tabu search and an ant colony optimization heuristics for obtaining minimum cost routes. The performance of the model and the heuristic approaches are evaluated using instances generated from a set of classic examples from the literature.

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  • Pureza, Vitória & Morabito, Reinaldo & Reimann, Marc, 2012. "Vehicle routing with multiple deliverymen: Modeling and heuristic approaches for the VRPTW," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 218(3), pages 636-647.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:218:y:2012:i:3:p:636-647
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2011.12.005
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    6. Brandstätter, Christian & Reimann, Marc, 2018. "The Line-haul Feeder Vehicle Routing Problem: Mathematical model formulation and heuristic approaches," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 270(1), pages 157-170.
    7. De La Vega, Jonathan & Gendreau, Michel & Morabito, Reinaldo & Munari, Pedro & Ordóñez, Fernando, 2023. "An integer L-shaped algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and stochastic demands," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 308(2), pages 676-695.
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    9. Majsa Ammouriova & Massimo Bertolini & Juliana Castaneda & Angel A. Juan & Mattia Neroni, 2022. "A Heuristic-Based Simulation for an Education Process to Learn about Optimization Applications in Logistics and Transportation," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 10(5), pages 1-18, March.
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    11. Pedro Munari & Reinaldo Morabito, 2018. "A branch-price-and-cut algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and multiple deliverymen," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 26(3), pages 437-464, October.
    12. Villegas, Juan G. & Prins, Christian & Prodhon, Caroline & Medaglia, Andrés L. & Velasco, Nubia, 2013. "A matheuristic for the truck and trailer routing problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 230(2), pages 231-244.
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