We address the Open Vehicle Routing Problem (OVRP), a variant of the ‘‘classical’’ (capacitated and distance constrained) Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in which the vehicles are not required to return to the depot after completing their service. We present a heuristic improvement procedure for OVRP based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP) techniques. Given an initial feasible solution to be po...

This paper proposes a flexible solution methodology for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Demands (VRPSD). The logic behind this methodology is to transform the issue of solving a given VRPSD instance into an issue of solving a small set of Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) instances. Thus, our approach takes advantage of the fact that extremely efficient metaheuristi...

Two of the most complex activities in production and operations management (POM) are inventory planning and operations scheduling. This chapter presents two problems related to these activities, namely, the capacitated lot-sizing and scheduling problem and the capacitated vehicle routing problem. For each of these problems, the authors discuss several solution methods, present a competitive gen...

Vehicle routing problems are at the heart of most decision support systems for real-life distribution problems. In vehicle routing problem a set of routes must be determined at lowest total cost for a number of resources (i.e. fleet of vehicles) located at one or several points (e.g. depots, warehouses) to efficiently service a number of demand or supply points. In this paper a new memetic algo...

Multi Compartment Vehicle Routing Problem is an extension of the classical Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem where different products are transported together in one vehicle with multiple compartments. Products are stored in different compartments because they cannot be mixed together due to differences in their individual characteristics. The problem is encountered in many industries such as...

In this article we present benchmark datasets for the Mixed Capacitated Arc Routing Problem under Time restrictions with Intermediate Facilities (MCARPTIF). The problem is a generalisation of the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP), and closely represents waste collection routing. Four different test sets are presented, each consisting of multiple instance files, and which can be used to ben...

In this paper we present a new approach to tackle complex routing problems with an improved state representation that utilizes the model complexity better than previous methods. We enable by training from temporal differences. Specifically Q-Learning is employed. show our achieves state-of-the-art performance for autoregressive policies sequentially insert nodes construct solutions on Capacitat...

A well known transformation by Pearn, Assad and Golden reduces a Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP) into an equivalent Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). However, that transformation is regarded as unpractical, since an original instance with r required edges is turned into a CVRP over a complete graph with 3r + 1 vertices. We propose a similar transformation that reduces this grap...

This paper describes a new method for solving the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). The CVRP is defined as the problem of delivering goods from a depot to a number of customers with a fleet of capacitated vehicles, minimizing the cost of distributing the goods while respecting the capacity constraints of the vehicles. We have developed a method based on Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) an...