Title: Minimising vehicle distribution duration considering service priority

Authors: Dimitra Alexiou

Addresses: Department of Spatial Planning and Development, School of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece

Abstract: A vehicle routing problem (VRP) is dealt with, where a fleet of vehicles serve (distribution/pickup) a given subset of demand locations in an urban network. A service time priority degree is given to a subset of demand locations. The aim of this paper is to find the least possible overall service time for vehicles to all the demand locations and particularly those that have a high degree of priority. The problem is dealt with in the context of graph theory and a corresponding method is proposed. The paper incorporates a numerical example of the proposed method.

Keywords: distribution; graph theory; vehicle routing; priority service; network.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMOR.2019.101616

International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research, 2019 Vol.15 No.1, pp.127 - 136

Received: 22 May 2017
Accepted: 18 Feb 2018
Published online: 14 Aug 2019 *

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