Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm Approach To Vehicle Routing Problem With Multiple Pickup And Multiple Delivery With Heterogeneous Vehicle And Time Window

Abstract

Today, as to companies whose work related to collecting and delivering goods from places to places, specifically E-logistics service providers, problems related to establish the optimal routes in term of operation cost and travelling time while satisfying the real-world application constraints (such as handling with heterogeneous vehicles, capacity limits, time window and driver working duration, etc.) have great impacts on cost for companies’ operations. And Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a well-known combinational optimization problem solving the called problems. This research studies a variant of VRPTW (Vehicle Routing Problem with Time window) which extends to deal with the case that the goods need to be picked up from multiple nodes and delivered to multiple nodes and the use of fleets of heterogeneous vehicles. The specific case in this research is to solve the routing problem of an E- logistics network of Giao hang tiet kiem company for intermediating goods between warehouses in a city before delivered to final customers by motorbikes. To extent the application of this variant of VRPTW, it can also be employed in many other fields: Retail distribution ( goods picked up from distributors/ warehouses are distributed to retailers or wholesalers), reversed logistics (simultaneously delivering goods to factories and picking up empty bottles and returning to the depot), Education( school-bus routing) and manufacturing( Factories intermediate among others to provide materials)