Investigations on vehicle routing Problem using a novel route Grouping technique with variants of Heuristic algorithms

Abstract

Transportation of human and goods forms a majority of cost newlineinvolved in any application. Transportation is the only means by which goods newlinecan be transferred from one place to another. For any business to be profitable, newlinetransportation of raw materials to factories and delivery of goods from factory newlineto customers must be done efficiently with low cost. This leads to the newlinedevelopment of business and hence, automatically contributes to the newlinedevelopment of a nation. Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a class of newlinetransportation problems which is the main focus of this research. newlineSingle Depot Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem with Time newlineWindows (SD-HVRPTW) can be used to define transportation of commodity newlineeither as delivery from the depot to the customers dispersed around the depot newlineor as pickup from the different customers to the central depot. Few vehicles newlinehave different characteristics and should start from the depot and end at the newlinedepot after servicing all the customers. The servicing of all the customers must newlinebe done within the time-windows specified by the customer. The major factor newlinebeing considered by most of the papers is minimization of distance which is newlinethe summation of distance of all the vehicles put together. newlineFor a problem having less than five customers and five vehicles, newlineexact algorithms provide the optimal solution. Exact algorithm is implemented newlineby means of Mixed Integer Linear Programming using a LINGO set code. newlineBenchmark instances with different count of customers and vehicles with their newlinecorresponding characteristics are provided as input. LINGO solver yields newlineoptimal solution with considerable time when the problem has less than five newlinecustomers and five vehicles newline