the vehicle routing problem with backhauls (vrpb) as an extension of the classical vehicle routing prob-lem (vrp) attempts to define a set of routes which services both linehaul customers whom product are to be delivered and backhaul customers whom goods need to be collected. a primary objective for the problem usually is minimizing the total distribution cost. most real-life problems have othe...

customer service level is of prime importance in today competitive world and has various dimensions with delivery quality being one of the most important ones. delivery quality has several parameters such as deliver time window options, time window size, etc. in this paper we focus on one of these parameters, namely time window setting. it has a direct impact upon customer satisfaction and busi...

one of methods of improvement of the material flow is cross docking that in is considered as a good method to reduce inventory and improve customer satisfaction. too, the vehicle routing problem is one of the important problems in distribution management and its goal is to find paths for delivering various cargos. therefore, this study was conducted in order to vehicle routing problem with cros...

A wide spectrum of “real world” problems, such as vehicle routing, machine and crew scheduling, facility location, portfolio analysis, electricity generation planning, and communication and transportation network design, demands the use of combinatorial optimization methods. By a combinatorial optimization problem, we mean a program where a linear or nonlinear objective function must be optimiz...

Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) is a well known NP hard combinatorial scheduling optimization problem in which minimum number of routes have to be determined to serve all the customers within their specified time windows. Different analytic and heuristic approaches have been tried to solve such problems. The proposed hybrid algorithm uses ant colony system as well as random se...

In most vehicle routing and crew scheduling applications solved by column generation, the subproblem corresponds to a shortest path problem with resource constraints (SPPRC) or one of its variants. This chapter proposes a classification and a generic formulation for the SPPRCs, briefly discusses complex modeling issues involving resources, and presents the most commonly used SPPRC solution meth...

In this paper, we develop and discuss several distance measures for permutation type representations of solutions of combinatorial optimisation problems. The problems discussed include single-machine and multiple-machine scheduling problems, the travelling salesman problem, vehicle routing problems, and many others. The distance measures are based on the edit distance. We introduce several exte...

In most vehicle routing and crew scheduling applications solved by column generation, the subproblem corresponds to a shortest path problem with resource constraints (SPPRC) or one of its variants. This paper proposes a classification and a generic formulation for the SPPRCs, briefly discusses complex modeling issues involving resources, and presents the most commonly used SPPRC solution method...

This article provides an introduction to approximation algorithms in stochastic optimization models arising in various application domains, including central areas of operations management, such as scheduling, facility location, vehicle routing problems, inventory and supply chain management and revenue management. Unfortunately, these models are very hard to solve to optimality both in theory ...

Network throughput and energy conservation are two conflicting important performance metrics for wireless sensor networks. Since these two objectives are in conflict with each other, it is difficult to achieve them simultaneously. In this paper, a joint duty cycle scheduling and energy aware routing approach is proposed based on evolutionary game theory which is called DREG. Making a trade-off ...