Article ID: | iaor20097355 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 59 |
Issue: | 7 |
Start Page Number: | 963 |
End Page Number: | 976 |
Publication Date: | Jul 2008 |
Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
Authors: | Alonso F, Alvarez M J, Beasley J E |
Keywords: | heuristics: tabu search |
In this paper, we consider a periodic vehicle routing problem that includes, in addition to the classical constraints, the possibility of a vehicle doing more than one route per day, as long as the maximum daily operation time for the vehicle is not exceeded. In addition, some constraints relating to accessibility of the vehicles to the customers, in the sense that not every vehicle can visit every customer, must be observed. We refer to the problem we consider here as the site–dependent multi–trip periodic vehicle routing problem. An algorithm based on tabu search is presented for the problem and computational results presented on randomly generated test problems that are made publicly available. Our algorithm is also tested on a number of routing problems from the literature that constitute particular cases of the proposed problem. Specifically we consider the periodic vehicle routing problem; the site–dependent vehicle routing problem; the multi–trip vehicle routing problem; and the classical vehicle routing problem. Computational results for our tabu search algorithm on test problems taken from the literature for all of these problems are presented.