Transportation of euro pallets solved as a split delivery vehicle routing problem

Abstract

The article is aimed at the logistic problem of the company transporting Euro pallets to its customers. The main focus is on finding more effective routes for pallets distribution in terms of the total distance. The real instance can be solved as the vehicle routing problem. In many cases, splitting of the customer demand into several routes, can significantly improve the solution. The real problem consists in the pallets distribution from the depot to twelve customers. For solution, model in MPL for Windows is formulated and solved in CPLEX. Because of NP-hardness of the problem, it is necessary to propose heuristic algorithms for getting the effective feasible solution instead of unreachable optimum solution.