The aim of this paper is to present and compare alternative hierarchical formulations for the periodic vehicle routing problem applied to solid waste collection. The solution of this problem is a one-week plan of daily routes for the transportation of mixed solid waste from containers to disposal facilities, taking into consideration the frequency of collection of each container within the plan...

In this paper, we explore trade-offs between operational flexibility and operational complexity in periodic distribution problems. We consider the gains from operational flexibility in terms of vehicle routing costs and customer service benefits, and the costs of operational complexity in terms of implementation difficulty. Periodic distribution problems arise in a number of industries, includi...

The purpose of this research is to present a new mathematical modeling for a vehicle routing problem considering concurrently the criteria such as distance, weight, traffic considerations, time window limitation, and heterogeneous vehicles in the reverse logistics network for collection of expired products. In addition, we aim to present an efficient solution approach according to differential ...

one of the most important extensions of the capacitated vehicle routing problem (cvrp) is the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery (vrpspd) where customers require simultaneous delivery and pick-up service. in this paper, we propose an effective ant colony optimization (eaco) which includes insert, swap and 2-opt moves for solving vrpspd that is different with common an...

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...

The purpose of this article is to review the literature on the topic of deterministic vehicle routing problem (VRP) and to give a review on the exact and approximate solution techniques. More specifically the approximate (meta-heuristic) solution techniques are classified into: tabu search, simulated annealing, genetic algorithm, evolutionary algorithm, hybrid algorithm, and Ant Colony Opti...

The heterogeneous fixed fleet open vehicle routing problem (HFFOVRP) is one of the most significant extension problems of the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP). The HFFOVRP is the problem of designing collection routes to a number of predefined nodes by a fixed fleet number of vehicles with various capacities and related costs. In this problem, the vehicle doesn’t return to the depot after se...

We investigate two matheuristic strategies using the periodic vehicle routing problem with time windows as a testbed. Two different metaheuristics are suitably combined with parts of a developed column generation approach: On the one hand a variable neighborhood search (VNS) acts as the sole provider of columns for a set covering model, hence realizing a pure metaheuristic column generation. He...

This paper deals with a case study which is a variant of the Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (PVRP). As in the traditional Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), customer locations each with a certain daily demand are given, as well as a set of capacitated vehicles. In addition, the PVRP has a horizon, say T days, and there is a frequency for each customer stating how often within this T -day period t...