| Article ID: | iaor20072336 |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Volume: | 57 |
| Issue: | 9 |
| Start Page Number: | 1045 |
| End Page Number: | 1052 |
| Publication Date: | Sep 2006 |
| Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
| Authors: | Laporte G., Boctor F., Renaud J., Priv J. |
| Keywords: | distribution, heuristics, agriculture & food |
The problem studied in this article arises from the distribution of soft drinks and collection of recyclable containers in a Quebec-based company. It can be modelled as a variant of the vehicle routing problem with a heterogeneous vehicle fleet, time windows, capacity and volume constraints, and an objective function combining routing costs and the revenue resulting from the sale of recyclable material. Three construction heuristics and an improvement procedure are developed for the problem. Comparative tests are performed on a real-life instance and on 10 randomly generated instances.