Title: Resolving a vehicle routing problem with heterogeneous fleet, mixed backhauls and time windows using cuckoo behaviour approach

Authors: Berghida Meryem; Boukra Abdelmadjid

Addresses: LSI Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Sciences and Technologies Houari Boumedienne, BP 32 El Alia 16111, Bab Ezzouar, Algiers, Algeria ' LSI Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Sciences and Technologies Houari Boumedienne, BP 32 El Alia 16111, Bab Ezzouar, Algiers, Algeria

Abstract: The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is one of the most famous NP-hard combinatorial optimisation problems. The use of exact methods for large instances of the problem, is not efficient. Thus, we propose in this paper, to solve a rarely studied case of VRP problem called vehicle routing problem with heterogeneous fleet, mixed backhauls and time windows (HVRPMBTW), using approximate method named cuckoo search algorithm. Our results show the effectiveness of this algorithm.

Keywords: vehicle routing problem; VRP; time windows; mixed backhauls; heterogeneous fleet; pickup and delivery; discrete cuckoo search.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2015.071491

International Journal of Operational Research, 2015 Vol.24 No.2, pp.132 - 144

Received: 25 Jun 2013
Accepted: 16 Sep 2013
Published online: 31 Aug 2015 *

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