in this paper we address the vrpcd, in which a set of homogeneous vehicles are used to transport products from the suppliers to customers via a cross-dock. the products can be consolidated at the cross-dock but cannot be stored for very long as the cross-dock does not have long-term inventory-holding capabilities. the objective of the vrpcd is to minimize the total traveled distance while respe...

the vehicle routing problem with backhauls (vrpb) as an extension of the classical vehicle routing prob-lem (vrp) attempts to define a set of routes which services both linehaul customers whom product are to be delivered and backhaul customers whom goods need to be collected. a primary objective for the problem usually is minimizing the total distribution cost. most real-life problems have othe...

customer service level is of prime importance in today competitive world and has various dimensions with delivery quality being one of the most important ones. delivery quality has several parameters such as deliver time window options, time window size, etc. in this paper we focus on one of these parameters, namely time window setting. it has a direct impact upon customer satisfaction and busi...

one of methods of improvement of the material flow is cross docking that in is considered as a good method to reduce inventory and improve customer satisfaction. too, the vehicle routing problem is one of the important problems in distribution management and its goal is to find paths for delivering various cargos. therefore, this study was conducted in order to vehicle routing problem with cros...

We propose an algorithmic framework that successfully addresses three vehicle routing problems: the multi-depot VRP, the periodic VRP, and the multi-depot periodic VRP with capacitated vehicles and constrained route duration. The meta-heuristic combines the exploration breadth of population-based evolutionary search, the aggressive improvement capabilities of neighborhood-based meta-heuristics,...

The class of vehicle routing problems (VRP) involves designing the optimal set of routes for fleets of vehicles for the purpose of serving a given set of customers. A variant of the VRP is the Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (PVRP) that consists in generating a set of routes for each day with minimal global costs and respecting all constraints of the problem. This paper presents a model for th...

Transportation in economic systems such as services, production and distribution enjoys a special and important position and provides a significant portion of the country's gross domestic product. Improvements in transportation system mean improvements in the traveling routes and the elimination of unnecessary distances in any system. The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the practical co...

We consider a Periodic Load-dependent Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (PLCVRP) encountered by medical centers and medical waste collection companies for the design of a weekly inventory routing schedule to transport medical wastes to treatment sites. In addition to minimization of transportation risk, occupational risk related to temporary storage of hazardous wastes at the health-care cent...

The paper presents an efficient Hybrid Genetic Search with Advanced Diversity Control for a large class of time-constrained vehicle routing problems, introducing several new features to manage the temporal dimension. New move evaluation techniques are proposed, accounting for penalized infeasible solutions with respect to time-window and duration constraints, and allowing to evaluate moves from...

A vehicle routing problem is a significant problem that has attracted great attention from researchers in recent years. The main objectives of the vehicle routing problem are to minimize the traveled distance, total traveling time, number of vehicles and cost function of transportation. Reducing these variables leads to decreasing the total cost and increasing the driver's satisfaction level. O...