The inventory routing problem involves trading off inventory holding costs at client locations with vehicle routing costs to deliver frequently from a single central depot to meet deterministic client demands over a finite planing horizon. In this paper, we consider periodic solutions that visit clients in one of several specified frequencies, and focus on the case when the frequencies of visit...

ABSTRACT. POPMUSIC — Partial optimization metaheuristic under special intensification conditions — is a template for tackling large problem instances. This template has been shown to be very efficient for various combinatorial problems like p-median, sum of squares clustering, vehicle routing and map labeling. In terms of algorithmic complexity, one of the most complex part of POPMUSIC template...

In this paper we first provide a thorough performance comparison of the three main Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) paradigms for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), namely the Rank based Ant System, the Max-Min Ant System and the Ant Colony System. Based on the results of this comparison we then implement a parallelization strategy to increase computational efficiency and study the effects of incr...

The recent research on the CVRP is being slowed down by the lack of a good set of benchmark instances. The existing sets suffer from at least one of the following drawbacks: (i) became too easy for current algorithms; (ii) are too artificial; (iii) are too homogeneous, not covering the wide range of characteristics found in real applications. We propose a new set of instances ranging from 100 t...

Capacitated vehicle routing problems (CVRPs) form the core of logistics planning and are hence of great practical and theoretical interest. This chapter considers the CVRP on trees (TCVRP), a problem that often naturally arises in railway, river, and rural road networks. Our objective is to build high-quality models that exploit the tree structure of the problem that can also be easily implemen...

Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a popular combinatorial optimization problem which consists in finding an optimal set of routes for a fleet of vehicles in order to serve a specified collection of clients. Capacitated VRP (CVRP) is a version of VRP in which every vehicle has a capacity parameter assigned. The UCT (Upper Confidence bounds applied to Trees) is a heuristic simulation-based algorit...

Most algorithms for solving vehicle routing problems use the criterion of minimizing total travel time in forming their routes. As illustrated in the paper, even in the case of a homogeneous fleet, solutions using other criteria may be preferred to the solution generated by minimizing total travel time. This situation becomes more pronounced when considering a vehicle routing problem where the ...

This paper proposes an abstraction of emerging vehicle routing problems, the Vehicle Routing Problem with Black Box Feasibility. In this problem the routes of a basic VRP need to satisfy an unknown set of constraints. A black box function to test the feasibility of a route is provided. This function is considered of non-linear complexity (in the length of the route). Practical examples of such ...

In the Vehicle Routing Problem with Deliveries, Selective Pickups and Time Windows, the set of customers is the union of delivery customers and pickup customers. A fleet of identical capacitated vehicles based at the depot must perform all deliveries and profitable pickups while respecting time windows. The objective is to minimize routing costs, minus the revenue associated with the pickups. T...

Manufacturers, who re-supply a large number of customers, continually struggle with the question of how to formulate a replenishment strategy. The purpose of this paper is to determine the optimal set of routes for a group of vehicles in the transportation network under defined constraints – which is known as the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) – delivering new items, and resolving the invent...