A study of vehicle routing problem via trade-off ranking method

Abstract

Vehicle routing defines selecting the minimum cost, distance, and/or time path from a depot to several alternatives for a goods or service to reach its destination. The objective of most routing problem is to minimize the total cost of providing the service. But other objectives also may come into play, particularly in the public sector. For emergency services, such as ambulance, police, and fire engine, minimizing the response time to an incident is of primary importance. A few routing algorithms do not use a deterministic algorithm to find the "best"route for a goods to get from its original source to its destination. Instead, to avoid congestion, a few algorithms use a randomized algorithm that routes a path to a randomly picked intermediate destination, and from there to its true destination. In this paper, the trade-off ranking method is used to solve for the vehicle routing treated as a conflicting multi-criteria problem. The integration of the trade-off ranking method into the vehicle routing problem gives another perspective on how to solve the problem, hence broadened the decision support system for the vehicle routing problem.