In an age when enterprises are increasingly dependent on their suppliers and customers, individual companies should broaden their scope in order to include other organisations participating in the same value chain. Consequently, different parties of the chain ought to exchange information to make sound decisions in order to cut down global costs or improve customer service. This paper proposes ...

This paper presents a guided local search heuristic to solve a vehicle routing problem with backhauls and time windows. The VRPBTW with and without customer precedence are both considered. Customer precedence requires that all linehaul customers be visited before any backhaul customer. The basic approach is to construct an initial infeasible solution and then use a guided local search to improv...

To meet the infrastructure coverage and capacity needed by future IoT applications, service providers may engage in mutually-beneficial modes of collaboration such as cooperative packet forwarding and gatewaying through fixed backhauls and Internet uplinks. In an effort to enable these modes of resource pooling while minimizing negative impact on collaborating providers, we developed a transpor...

In this paper, a capacitated vehicle routing problem with mixed linehauls and backhauls is presented. The addressed problem belongs to the subclass of pickup and delivery problems. Loading and sequencing constraints are also considered. These constraints arise in many realworld situations, and can improve efficiency since backhaul customers do not need to be delayed in a route when it is possib...

In this paper, we consider a novel cache-enabled heterogeneous network (HetNet), where macro base stations (BSs) with traditional sub-6 GHz are overlaid by dense millimeter wave (mmWave) pico BSs. These two-tier BSs, which are modeled as two independent homogeneous Poisson Point Processes, cache multimedia contents following the popularity rank. High-capacity backhauls are utilized between macr...

In this paper, we investigate the Multi-Depot Heterogeneous VRP with Backhauls. Though problem is a generalisation of three existing routing problems, first time combined investigated. A mathematical formulation presented followed by some tightening. powerful and novel hybridisation Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) Greedy Randomized Adaptive Memory Programming proposed. As there are no insta...

This paper presents a meta-heuristic, which is based on the Threshold Accepting combined with modified Nearest Neighbor and Exchange procedures, to solve the Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls and Time Windows (VRPBTW). The VRPBTW assumes that trucks initially start from the depot, deliver goods to the linehaul customers, successively pickup goods from the backhaul consumers, and finally re...