Modeling a vehicle routing problem with multiple depots, time windows and heterogeneous fleet of a courier service

Abstract

The objective of this article is to present the modeling of a courier service, called bank exchange, as a vehicle routing problem that considers restrictions of time windows, capacity, heterogeneous fleet, and multiple depots. Researches about vehicle routing problems have been growing exponentially in the last few years, nevertheless, only few of them consider multiple restrictions as the ones present in the case study that inspired this research. To solve the problem a hybrid algorithm between the ant colony optimization and the sweep algorithm was created. Among the results obtained there is a 4.5% reduction in required resources. Finally, it was concluded that the development of new Vehicle Routing Problem models (VRP) that consider multiple simultaneous constraints allows modeling and solving the real problems faced by companies.