Integration of GIS and Optimization Routines for the Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract

This paper evokes the vehicle routing problem (VRP) which aims to determine the minimum total cost pathways for a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles to deliver a set of customers' orders. The inability of optimization algorithms alone to fully satisfy the needs of logistic managers become obvious in transportation field due to the spatial nature of such problems. In this context, we couple a geographical information system (GIS) with a metaheuristic to handle the VRP efficiently then generate a geographical solution instead of the numerical solution. A real-case instance in a Tunisian region is studied in order to test the proposed approach. KEYWORDS Vehicle routing problem; Dijkstra-based approach; Geographical information system.