In the classical vehicle routing problem, a fleet of vehicles deliver goods from a central depot to a set of customers with known demands. The objective of the problem is to form minimum cost routes for the delivery vehicle, while serving all the cust...
In the classical vehicle routing problem, a fleet of vehicles deliver goods from a central depot to a set of customers with known demands. The objective of the problem is to form minimum cost routes for the delivery vehicle, while serving all the customer demands. One of the practical variants of the vehicle routing problem is found when there are compatibility problems between some of the customer sites and some of the heterogeneous fleet of vehicles. Only one heuristic algorithm for this vehicle routing with site dependencies is known to this date.
This paper presents a mathematical model of the problem of vehicle routing with site dependencies, and analyzes the existing algorithm of the problem. Then this paper considers possible improvements of the existing algorithm in two ways. In the first one, the generalized assignment heuristic (GAH) is adopted to form a more balanced cluster of customers and thus to reduce the total routing cost. In the second one, the tabu search (TS) metaheuristic is utilized to further improve suboptimal solutions obtained by the existing algorithm. Implementations of these improvements remain as a topic of future research on the problem.