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...

A Two-phase model for configuring a cellular manufacturing system is proposed. In phase (I), for the first time, number of cells is considered as a decision variable. In phase (II), pursing two different objectives, one minimization of underload and the other, maximization of similarity of parts within a group, the design procedure is performed. As one cannot have these two objects together, a ...

this article addresses a multi-stage flowshop scheduling problem with equal number of unrelated parallel machines. the objective is to minimize the makespan for a given set of jobs in the system. this problem class is np-hard in the strong sense, so a hybrid heuristic method for sequencing and then allocating operations of jobs to machines is developed. a number of test problems are randomly ge...

vehicle routing problem (vrp) is one of the major problems in the transportation and distribution planning. in the most previous studies, the objective of vrp models was distance and vehicle related costs. however in many industrial cases along with routing distance, vehicle loading amount is a factor of cost function. in this paper, we formulate a mixed integer non-linear programming (minlp) m...