Meta heuristic approaches for solving variants of vehicle routing problem with mid way halts

Abstract

Logistics plays a vital role for any distribution management The distribution of goods from production centres or central depot to customers are addressed under the topic Vehicle Routing Problem VRP in the literature VRP is an important area of research in Operations Research Community It is a NP hard Combinatorial Optimization Problem The objective of VRP is to design low cost route with a set of homogenous vehicles available at the depot to serve a set of geographically distributed customers The route begins and ends with the central distribution centre serving each customer once and returning to the depot To solve VRP many algorithms including heuristics are designed As VRP provides real life solution for several problems many researchers have contributed different solution methodology for solving the problem Different variants on VRP like Stochastic VRP SVRP VRP with Time Windows VRPTW Multi Depot VRP MDVRP VRP with Pickup and Delivery VRPPD etc are developed using additional constraints In addition to these traditional variants new objectives and constraints that address the real time issues are incorporated into VRP These include pollution routing problem hazardous materials transportation and routing perishable goods routing environment friendly routing emergency routing to name a few The focal point of this research work is to study a variant of VRP namely Vehicle Routing Problem with Mid way Halts VRPMH The objective of VRPMH is to devise low cost route for a set of geographically distributed customers by a fleet of homogenous vehicles stationed at a depot where the vehicle halts in between for some service in facility centres service centres This study proposes to introduce frameworks on VRPMH by incorporating real life objectives and constraints and also proposes to devise environment friendly routing for vehicles newline