Search results for "Vehicle routing"

Joint Route Planning under Varying Market Conditions

2006

Purpose - To provide empirical evidence on the level of savings that can be attained by joint route planning and how these savings depend on specific market characteristics.Design/methodology/approach - Joint route planning is a measure that companies can take to decrease the costs of their distribution activities. Essentially, this can either be achieved through horizontal cooperation or through outsourcing distribution to a Logistics Service Provider.The synergy value is defined as the difference between distribution costs in the original situation where all entities perform their orders individually, and the costs of a system where all orders are collected and route schemes are set up si…

Drivers-Inspired Ants for Solving the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

2016

International audience; In our study, we develop a method that merges two information sources within ants colony optimization heuristic. Namely artificial ants which occurs for short term optimization and transporter's vehicles that occurs in long term and continuous optimization toward solving the real-world vehicle routing problem. This study is supported by a transporter (Upsilon) of the region of l'Yonne in France and a transport and logistics software development company (Tedies). Our method suits for transporters that use human planners to make decisions about their tours and intending to move to computer planners without drastically upsetting the drivers habits. Hence, the pledge of …

Application of a Knowledge Discovery Process to Study Instances of Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems

2020

Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) are computationally challenging, constrained optimization problems, which have central role in logistics management. Usually different solvers are being developed and applied for different kind of problems. However, if descriptive and general features could be extracted to describe such problems and their solution attempts, then one could apply data mining and machine learning methods in order to discover general knowledge on such problems. The aim then would be to improve understanding of the most important characteristics of VRPs from both efficient solution and utilization points of view. The purpose of this article is to address these challenges by proposi…

A hybrid evolution strategy for the open vehicle routing problem

2010

This paper presents a hybrid evolution strategy (ES) for solving the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP), which is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem that addresses the service of a set of customers using a homogeneous fleet of non-depot returning capacitated vehicles. The objective is to minimize the fleet size and the distance traveled. The proposed solution method manipulates a population of @m individuals using a (@m+@l)-ES; at each generation, a new intermediate population of @l offspring is produced via mutation, using arcs extracted from parent individuals. The selection and combination of arcs is dictated by a vector of strategy parameters. A multi-parent recombination …

Hybridizing large neighborhood search and exact methods for generalized vehicle routing problems with time windows

2021

International audience; Delivery options are at the heart of the generalized vehicle routing problem with time windows (GVRPTW) allowing that customer requests are shipped to alternative delivery locations which can also have different time windows. Recently, the vehicle routing problem with delivery options was introduced into the scientific literature. It extends the GVRPTW by capacities of shared locations and by specifying service-level constraints defined by the customers' preferences for delivery options. The vehicle routing problem with delivery options also generalizes the vehicle routing problem with home roaming delivery locations and the vehicle routing problem with multiple time…

Sustainable vehicle routing based on firefly algorithm and TOPSIS methodology

2019

Abstract In a sustainable management of logistics, transportation plays a crucial role. Traditionally, the main purpose was to solve the Vehicle Routing Problem minimizing the cost associated with the travelled distances. Nowadays, the economic profit cannot be the only driver for achieving sustainability and environmental issues have to be also considered. In this paper, to satisfy the intricate limits involved in real vehicle routing problem, the study has been structured considering different types of vehicles in terms of maximum capacity, velocity and emissions, asymmetric paths, vehicle-client constraints and delivery time windows. The firefly algorithm has been implemented to solve th…

On automatic algorithm configuration of vehicle routing problem solvers

2019

Many of the algorithms for solving vehicle routing problems expose parameters that strongly influence the quality of obtained solutions and the performance of the algorithm. Finding good values for these parameters is a tedious task that requires experimentation and experience. Therefore, methods that automate the process of algorithm configuration have received growing attention. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study to critically evaluate and compare the capabilities and suitability of seven state-of-the-art methods in configuring vehicle routing metaheuristics. The configuration target is the solution quality of eight metaheuristics solving two vehicle routing problem variants.…

Time-Dependent Multiple Depot Vehicle Routing Problem on Megapolis Network under Wardrop's Traffic Flow Assignment

2018

In this work multiple depot vehicle routing problem is considered in case of variable travel times between nodes on a metropolis network. This variant of the classic multiple depot vehicle routing problem is motivated by the fact that in urban contexts variable traffic conditions play an essential role and can not be ignored in order to perform a realistic optimization. Time-travel matrices corresponding to each period of planning horizon were formed by solving the traffic assignment problem in conjunction with shortest path problem. Routing problem instances include from 20 to 100 customers randomly chosen from a road network of Saint-Petersburg. The results demonstrate that taking into ac…

Metaheuristics meet metamodels : a modeling language and a product line architecture for route optimization systems

2011

Feature Extractors for Describing Vehicle Routing Problem Instances

2016

The vehicle routing problem comes in varied forms. In addition to usual variants with diverse constraints and specialized objectives, the problem instances themselves – even from a single shared source - can be distinctly different. Heuristic, metaheuristic, and hybrid algorithms that are typically used to solve these problems are sensitive to this variation and can exhibit erratic performance when applied on new, previously unseen instances. To mitigate this, and to improve their applicability, algorithm developers often choose to expose parameters that allow customization of the algorithm behavior. Unfortunately, finding a good set of values for these parameters can be a tedious task that…