A New Competitive Approach on Multi-Objective Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem

This paper presents a novel multi-objective mathematical model of a periodic vehicle routing problem (PVRP) in a competitive situation for obtaining more sales. In such a situation, the reaching time to customers affects the sale amount therefore, distributors intend to service customers earlier than other rivals for obtaining the maximum sale. Moreover, a partial driver’s benefit is related to the amount of their sale thus, the balance of goods based on the vehicles capacity is important. Due to its complexity, it is so difficult to optimally solve this problem in a reasonable computational time. Hence, two algorithms are proposed based on multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) and NSGAII algorithm. A comparison of our results with three performance metrics confirms that the proposed MOPSO is an efficient algorithm for solving the competitive PVRP with a reasonable computational time. Keywords: Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem, Competitive Time Windows, Multi Objective Optimization, MOPSO.