Title: Heuristic procedure for bi-capacitated multiple-trip vehicle routing problem

Authors: Tarit Rattanamanee; Suebsak Nanthavanij

Addresses: Department of Materials Handling and Logistics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok, Bangkok 10800, Thailand ' School of Management Technology, Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University, Pathum Thani, 12121, Thailand

Abstract: The multiple-trip vehicle routing problem with physical workload (MTVRP-WL) or bi-capacitated MTVRP is intended to find an optimal number of delivery trucks and their travel routes to serve a set of customers having constant load demands within a given time limit. Delivery workers who are pre-assigned to trucks must manually unload goods at customer locations. Both trucks and workers are heterogeneous in terms of the load capacity and working energy capacity, respectively. Initially, the random nearest neighbourhood search technique is employed to generate an initial feasible solution. Then, the solution is improved using two local search operators, namely, greedy swap and 2-opt. The improvement algorithms are repeated for a number of iterations until no further improvement is obtained. From a computation experiment, the heuristic procedure is found to be efficient since it can obtain near-optimal MTVRP solutions in reasonable computation time. [Submitted: 5 November 2020; Accepted: 7 April 2021]

Keywords: multiple-trip vehicle routing problem; bi-capacitated problem; heuristic algorithm; local search; physical workload; intra-city logistics.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIE.2022.121904

European Journal of Industrial Engineering, 2022 Vol.16 No.3, pp.294 - 316

Received: 05 Nov 2020
Accepted: 07 Apr 2021
Published online: 07 Apr 2022 *

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