Vehicle Routing Problem with Multiple Time Windows and Batch Splitting Based on Inferior First Bidirectional Search Algorithm

Abstract

Considering continuous scheduling and full use of time in vehicle routing problem, we proposed a vehicle routing problem model with multi-time windows based on batch splitting, constructed an inferior-first bidirectional search algorithm (IFBSA) and established a quantitative measurement benchmark of "inferiority level" using Gaussian kernel function. We designed 30 examples based on some actual road network data and chose nearest neighbour search algorithm (NNSA) for comparing. Our results showed that, IFBSA reduced vehicles in 20 examples and got superior results in 23 examples for all examples compared with NNSA.