Solving two - echelon vehicle routing for delivery fruits and vegetables

Abstract

This research aims to propose Tabu Search Heuristics for the Two-echelon Vehicle Routing Problem with Time window for delivery fruit and vegetable in urban area logistics, which is an extension of classical vehicle routing problem (VRP), a classic combinatorial optimization problem. The problem is analyzed to fit with the real-life condition in delivery such as time window and capacity constraint. In Tabu Search, a new solution representation called “multi-level solution representation” is proposed which is easy to read without decode, easy to code and easy to apply to many type of VRPs problem. With the new solution representation, 2E-CVRPTW can be solved 2 echelons simultaneously. Our research also proposed 7 rules to find neighbor candidates. The heuristic will be test and benchmark with some dataset from University of Vienna, Germany and test with real data. The result show that the effective of Tabu Search in solving combination problem in the real-life condition. Keywords: vehicle routing; two-echelon VRPTW; city logistics; Tabu search algorithm; new solution representation