In the Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls (VRPB), a central depot, a fleet of homogeneous vehicles, and a set of customers are given. The set of customers is divided into two subsets. The first (second) set of linehauls (backhauls) consists of customers with known quantity of goods to be delivered from (collected to) the depot. The VRPB objective is to design a set of minimum cost routes; o...

Given a fleet of vehicles assigned to a single depot, the vehicle routing problem with time windows (vrptw) consists of determining a set of feasible routes to deliver goods to a set of customers while minimizing, first, the number of vehicles used and, second, total mileage. Each customer must be visited exactly once by a vehicle within a prescribed time interval. A route starts from the depot...

This paper introduces a new routing problem referred to as the vehicle routing problem with vector profits. Given a network composed of nodes (depot/sites) and arcs connecting the nodes, the problem determines routes that depart from the depot, visit sites to collect profits, and return to the depot. There are multiple stakeholders interested in the mission and each site is associated with a ve...

This paper introduces an extension of the multi-start local search framework [1, 2, 3], named Systematic Diversification for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, where the objective is to design least cost routes for a fleet of vehicles 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 ...

The objective of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is to construct a minimum cost set of vehicle routes that visits all customers and satisfies demands without violating the vehicle capacity constraints. The Stochastic Vehicle Routing Problem (SVRP) results when one or more elements of the VRP are modeled as random variables. In this paper, we present a set-partitioning-based modeling framework...

A typical vehicle routing problem can be described as the problem of designing least cost routes from one depot to a set of geographically scattered points (cities, stores, warehouses, schools, customers etc). The routes must be designed in such a way that each point is visited only once by exactly one vehicle, all routes start and end at the depot, and the total demands of all points on one pa...

The purpose of this paper is to present a coalition based multi-agent model for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, which is one of the most important ones in distribution and transportation. The VRPTW objective is to design least cost routes from one depot to a set of customers. A fleet of homogeneous vehicles performs the routes to serve all the customers, while respecting capacity...

Providing distributed services on road networks is an essential concern for many applications, such asmail delivery, logistics and police patrolling. Designing effective and balanced routes for these applications is challenging, especially when involving multiple postmen from distinct depots. In this research, we formulate this routing problem as a MinMaxMultiple-Depot Rural Postman Problem (MM...

This study developed a series of strategies to reassess the service level winter road maintenance (WRM) operations on network in Perth County, Ontario, Canada. These include rearranging plow routes by sharing material storage yards and optimizing their numbers locations while considering operational legislative constraints such as total circuit time, operating speeds, number available trucks. A...

This paper introduces a special kind of multi-depot pickup and delivery problem. In contrast to the general pickup and delivery problem (GPDP, see e.g. [19, 31]) all requests have to be picked up at or delivered to one central location which has the function of a hub or consolidation point. In hub transportation networks routes between customers and the hub are often short, i.e. involve only on...