The vehicle routing problem with time windows for perishable food delivery in Ho Chi Minh city

Abstract

Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window (VRPTW) has been becoming one of the major considerations for enterprises in today’s competitive economy in which on-time and cost-effective delivery is a must. This study has enlarged conventional VRPTW by developing a model which further includes the randomness of the perishable food delivery to restaurants chains, which is Golden Gate Restaurant Group in this case. The objective is identified as minimizing the total cost including the fixed costs for dispatching vehicles, transportation costs, inventory and energy costs. “Time-oriented Nearest-neighbor Heuristic” by Solomon (1983) have also been applied and employed by the Python programming language to find a solution for the proposed model. Results expose the significant influence of the inventory and energy costs to the total delivery costs, and provide the company with the optimal vehicle routings for their perisable delivery. Keywords: VRPTW; perishable food delivery; hard time-window; Time-oriented Nearest- Neighbor Heuristic