The two-echelon capacitated vehicle routing problem

Abstract

The two-echelon capacitated vehicle routing problem (2EVRP) is an extension and variation of the common capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) used for optimizing distribution system by minimizing delivery cost. The system uses a fleet of vehicles to serve a set of customers and subjects to a set of constraints. Many approaches of solving have been proposed since this kind of problem was invented, few of them are waste a great amount of time to arrive at near optimal solution. To overcome that, this research presents a two-phase heuristics approach: clustering customers using K-means clustering method and then solve the multi-level vehicle routing problem based on a meta-heuristics called Simulated Annealing. Key words: clustering, annealing, constraint, algorithm, configuration