Abstract

MOURA, Ana  and  OLIVEIRA, José F.. A multi-phase heuristic for the delivery pick-up vehicle-routing problem with time-windows. Inv. Op. [online]. 2004, vol.24, n.1, pp.45-62. ISSN 0874-5161.

In this paper a new heuristic for the vehicle routing problem is presented. This algorithm was applied to a problem originated from a Portuguese alimentary products distribution company. This company has many clients and more then 130 deliveries per day for all products. When considering these figures, the vehicle routing problem becomes too much complex to be manually solved. The necessity of automatization naturally arises. This new multi-phase heuristic has a constructive phase, a local optimisation phase and a pos-optimisation phase, and aims the minimization of the sum of the routes total time. Additional constraints to the vehicle routing problem, driven by the particular company that motivated this work, are considered. In particular time-windows both for the drivers and for the clients and pick-up together with deliveries are considered.

Keywords : Vehicle routing problem; Time-windows; Pick-up and delivery; Multiple travelling salesman problem; heuristics.

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