Impact of meta-heuristic methods to solve multi-depot vehicle routing problems with time windows

Abstract

Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (MDVRPTW) is a kind of NP-hard optimization problem which is described, as the problem of creating routes with optimum cost from one depot to a set of customer sites. Each customer has been visited just one time by only one vehicle within a proposed time interval, all routes start and finish at the same depot and the routes cannot violate the capacity constraints on the vehicles. This study addresses, the problem of multi depot vehicle routing in order to minimize the number of vehicles and the total travel cost. The proposed is a mixed integer programming model for the problem and provides a computable MDVRPTW in order to solve the problem; the genetic algorithm is the approach to this model.