The classical vehicle routing problem involves to design a set of routes for a fleet of vehicles based at one central depot that is required to service a number of geographically dispersed customers, while minimizing the total travel distance or the total distribution cost. Each route originates and terminates at the central depot and customers’ demand are known. In many practical distribution ...

The article describes an investigation of the effectiveness of genetic algorithms for multi-objective combinatorial optimization (MOCO) by presenting an application for the vehicle routing problem with soft time windows. The work is motivated by the question, if and how the problem structure influences the effectiveness of different configurations of the genetic algorithm. Computational results...

This paper studies a vehicle routing problem with time-dependent and stochastic travel times. In our problem setting, customers have soft time windows. A mathematical model is used in which both efficiency for service as well as reliability for customers are taken into account. Depending on whether service times are included or not, we consider two versions of this problem. Two metaheuristics a...

delivering perishable products to customers as soon as possible and with the minimum cost has been always a challenge for producers and has been emphasized over recent years due to the global market becoming more competitive. in this paper a multi-objective mix integer non-linear programming model is proposed to maximize both profits of a distributer and the total freshness of the several produ...

Given a set of service requests (events), a set of guided servers (units), and a set of unguided service contractors (conts), the vehicle dispatching problem VDP is the task to find an assignment of events to units and conts as well as tours for all units starting at their current positions and ending at their home positions (dispatch) such that the total cost of the dispatch is minimized. The ...

In this paper, an adaptive variable neighborhood search ant colony algorithm (AVNSACA) is proposed to solve the vehicle routing problem with soft time windows (VRPSTW). The algorithm’s pheromone update strategy improved make up for lack of in early stage. order avoid falling into local optimum, two operators are designed, and conditions enter set. effectiveness AVNSACA solving verified b...