Vehicle Routing Problem with Time windows (VRPTW) is an example of scheduling in constrained environment. It 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. So far different analytic and heuristic approaches have been tried to solve such problems. In this...

The efficiency of transportation requests fulfillment can be increased through extending the problem of vehicle routing and scheduling by the possibility of subcontracting a part of the requests to external carriers. This problem extension transforms the usual vehicle routing and scheduling problems to the more general integrated operational transportation problems. In this contribution, we ana...

ii ABSTRACT In certain types of fleet systems, the environmental impacts of fleet operation are, to some extent, a controllable function of vehicle routing and scheduling decisions. However, there has been little prior work that has considered environmental impacts in fleet vehicle routing and scheduling optimization, in particular, where the impacts were assessed systematically utilizing life-...

This paper aims to study the locomotive routing problem (LRP) which is one of the most important problems in railroad scheduling in view of involving expensive assets and high cost of operating locomotives. This problem is assigning a fleet of locomotives to a network of trains to provide sufficient power to pull them from their origins to destinations by satisfying a rich set of operational con...

This study is concerned with how the quality of perishable products can be improved by shortening the time interval between production and distribution. As special types of food such as dairy products decay fast, the integration of production and distribution scheduling (IPDS) is investigated. An integrated scheduling of both processes improves the performance and costs because the separated sc...