Generalized Reduced Gradient Approach for Solving Periodic Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem with Side Constraints

Abstract

In order to transport customers' request economically, such as, goods, meals etc it is frequently the delivery company depend on a model which is called vehicle routing problem (VRP). This model consists of a customer population with deterministic demands, and a central station which acts asthe base of a set of vehicles. The purpose is to design the vehicle routes starting and terminatingat the assigned central station, such that the customer demands is met, within a time windows This paper develops an optimization model for the management of periodic deliveries of a given commodity. Due to the geographic location of customers the company requires to have diverse type of vehicleswith diverse capacity to serve the commodity for customers. This kind of problem is called PeriodicHeterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem (PHVRP). The purpose is to schedule periodically the deliveries according to feasible combinations of delivery days and to determine the scheduling of fleet anddriver and routing policies of the vehicles. The aim is to minimize the total costs of all routes over the planning horizon. We propose a combined approach of reduced gradient and heuristic algorithm to solve the problem.