RMC (Ready-mixed concrete) vehicle scheduling problem is a complex combinatorial optimization problem with intersection of several research areas, such as logistics, just-in-time production and supply chains etc. We integrates RMC production scheduling and vehicle dispatch problems in the same framework by network flow techniques and establishes a mixed integer programming model for ready-mixed...

A competitive neural network model and a genetic algorithm are used to improve the initialization and construction phase of a parallel insertion heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with time windows. The neural network identifies seed customers that are suitably distributed over the entire geographic area during the initialization phase, and the genetic algorithm finds good parameter sett...

The vehicle routing problem with time windows, widely used in practice, is an NP-hard problem. This paper presents a new meta-heuristic algorithm for solving the problem. Unlike traditional two-steps algorithms, the proposed optimization algorithm, based on the artificial bee colony algorithm combined with the vector evaluated technique, solves the problem as a multi-objective problem. As a res...

Practical vehicle routing problems generally have both routing and scheduling aspects to consider. However, few heuristicmethods exist that address both these complicated aspects simultaneously. We present heuristics to determine an efficient circular traversal of a weighted graph that requires a subset of its edges to be traversed, each a specified (potentially different) number of times. Cons...

This paper presents a novel hybrid ant colony optimization approach called SS_ACO algorithm to solve the vehicle routing problem. The main feature of the hybrid algorithm is to hybridize the solution construction mechanism of the ant colony optimization (ACO) with scatter search (SS). In our hybrid algorithm, we use ACO algorithm and greedy heuristic to generate the initial solutions which are ...

This paper presents new structural properties for the carrier–vehicle traveling salesman problem. The authors provide a mixed-integer second-order conic optimization formulation, with associated optimality cuts based on properties, and an iterated local search (ILS) algorithm. Computational experiments instances from literature demonstrate superiority of formulation to existing models algorithm...

Routing of service vehicles are the heart of many service operations. Exclusively vehicle routing problem (VRP) plays a central role in the optimization of distribution networks. The routing of service vehicles has a major impact on the quality of the service provided. In distribution of goods and services, it is time and again required to determine a combination of least cost vehicle routes th...

I the vehicle routing problem (VRP) the objective is to construct a minimum cost set of routes serving all customers where the demand of each customer is less than or equal to the vehicle capacity and where each customer is visited once. In the split delivery vehicle routing problem (SDVRP) the restriction that each customer is visited once is removed. We show that the cost savings that can be ...

The distribution service of commodities has tremendous impacts on cost-effective performance and level of customer satisfaction for third party logistics. One of main concerns is how to balance workloads among vehicles and ensure delivery time for each vehicle within the required duration. In this study, a multi-objective mixed zero-one integer programming model for the vehicle routing problem...