An Approximation Approach for a Real-World Variant of Vehicle Routing Problem

In this paper, we study a real-world variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem, arising from the work of distributing products of an industrial corporation. Given information about vehicles, depots, types of products, and the location of customers, we wish to determine the minimum number of vehicles required to pick up and deliver products to customers within a time limit. Using these vehicles, we are interested in a routing plan that minimizes the total travelling time. Our proposed solution is presented as follows: First, we introduce an exact algorithm using dynamic programming; Second, by relaxing dynamic programming formulation, we give a heuristic algorithm; Third, we provide our experimental results of the heuristic algorithm on real-world datasets provided by the corporation and highlight the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.