This paper presents a survey of the research on the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW). The VRPTW can be described as the problem of designing least cost routes from one depot to a set of geographically scattered points. The routes must be designed in such a way that each point is visited only once by exactly one vehicle within a given time interval, all routes start and end at t...

This report presents a survey of research on the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW). The VRPTW can be described as the problem of designing least cost routes from one depot to a set of geographically scattered points. The routes must be designed in such a way that each point is visited only once by exactly one vehicle within a given time interval, all routes start and end at the ...

A hyper-heuristic is a heuristic optimisation method which generates or selects heuristics (move operators) based on a set of components while solving a computationally difficult problem. Apprenticeship learning arises while observing the behaviour of an expert in action. In this study, we use a multilayer perceptron (MLP) as an apprenticeship learning algorithm to improve upon the performance ...

The purpose of this paper is to determine the route of the vehicle routing problem with backhauls (VRPB), delivering new items and picking up the reused items or wastes, and resolve the inventory control decision problem simultaneously since the regular VRPB does not. Both the vehicle routing decision for delivery and pickup, and the inventory control decision affect each other and must be cons...

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. The problem is easy to state, but hard to solve. Many real-world problems can be formulated as instances of the TSP, for example, computer wiring, vehicle routing, crystallography, robot control, drilling of printed circuit boards and chronological sequencing. In this paper, we present a modified hy...

We present a unified heuristic which is able to solve five different variants of the vehicle routing problem: the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), the multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP), the site-dependent vehicle routing problem (SDVRP) and the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP). All problemvariants are transformed int...

The Two-Echelon Routing Problem constitutes a class of combinatorial optimization problems with applications in many different fields such as city logistic planning, intermodal transportation, postal and parcel delivery distribution systems and so on. This thesis contains: a survey of the main contributions related to the two-echelon routing, focusing on the Two-Echelon Location Routing Problem...

This paper presents a hybrid approach that aims at solving the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) by means of combining Constraint Programming (CP) with Lagrangian Relaxation (LR) and Probabilistic Algorithms. After introducing the CVRP and reviewing the main literature on this area, the paper proposes the use of a multistart hybrid Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) algorithm. This al...

This research deals with a hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with parallel batching, machine eligibility, unrelated parallel machine, and different release dates to minimize the sum of the total weighted earliness and tardiness (ET) penalties. In parallel batching situation, it is supposed that number of machine in some stages are able to perform a certain number of jobs simultaneously. First...

This paper presents a new multi-depot combined vehicle and crew scheduling algorithm, and uses it, in conjunction with a heuristic vehicle routing algorithm, to solve the intra-city mail distribution problem faced by Australia Post. First we describe the Australia Post mail distribution problem and outline the heuristic vehicle routing algorithm used to find vehicle routes. We present a new mul...