Title: A hybrid metaheuristics approach for a multi-depot vehicle routing problem with simultaneous deliveries and pickups

Authors: Sonu Rajak; P. Parthiban; R. Dhanalakshmi

Addresses: Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli-620015, India; Department of Production Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi – 835215, India ' Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli-620015, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Nagaland, Dimapur – 797103, India

Abstract: Multi-depot vehicle routing problem with simultaneous deliveries and pickups (MDVRPSDP) is a variant of classical vehicle routing problem (VRP), which has often encountered in real-life scenarios of transportation logistics; Where, vehicles are required to simultaneously deliver the goods and also pick-up some goods from the customers. The current scenario importance of reverse logistics activities has increased. Therefore it is necessary to determine efficient and effective vehicle routes for simultaneous delivery and pick-up activities. MDVRPSDP, which is very well-known non-deterministic polynomial-hard (NP-hard) and combinatorial optimisation (CO) problem, which requires metaheuristics to solve this type of problems. In this context, this article presents a hybrid metaheuristic which combines simulated annealing (SA), ant colony optimisation (ACO) and along with long-arc-broken removal heuristic approach for solving the MDVRPSDP. The preliminary results show that the proposed algorithm can provide good solutions.

Keywords: K-means clustering; vehicle routing problem; VRP; simulated annealing; ant colony optimisation; ACO; long-arc-broken removal heuristic.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMOR.2019.101619

International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research, 2019 Vol.15 No.2, pp.197 - 210

Received: 25 Aug 2017
Accepted: 24 Feb 2018
Published online: 16 Aug 2019 *

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