Modeling the vehicle routing problem for a soft drink distribution company

In this paper, we present a modeling study of vehicle routing problem (VRP) for a soft drink distribution company and propose a method to solve it. The distribution problem is concerned with assigning a fixed fleet of heterogeneous vehicles to serve the customers at various districts. The proposed methodology consists of two phases. Phase I is used to assign a fixed fleet of vehicles to districts on a long-term basis. In Phase II, three methods are proposed to reroute the assigned vehicles to solve the daily VRP. Customer demand data over a 23-day period are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. The results show that the proposed methods give a better solution to the current distribution problem.