Real-life vehicle routing with non-standard constraints

• Main Author: Lee, Wee Leong
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Logistics; Distribution; Heuristic; Sweep method; Vehicle routing; Databases and Information Systems; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7041; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8044/viewcontent/WCE2013_pp432_437.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Real-life vehicle routing problems comprise of a number of complexities that are not considered by the classical models found in vehicle routing literature. I present, in this paper, a two-stage sweep-based heuristic to find good solutions to a real-life Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). The problem I shall consider, will deal with some non-standard constraints beyond those normally associated with the classical VRP. Other than considering the capacity constraints for vehicles and the time windows for deliveries, I shall introduce four additional non-standard constraints: merging of customer orders, controlling the maximum number of drop points, matching orders to vehicle types, and controlling mixed-load permutations between goods. My algorithm has been successfully implemented in a Third-Party Logistics (3PL) managed distribution operations of dairy products with reasonably good results and response time.