Comparison of non-split and split delivery strategies for the heterogeneous vehicle routing problem

This paper considers fresh goods distribution of a retail chain store in Izmir. The problem is formulated as a vehicle routing problem with a heterogeneous fleet. Although there are exact algorithms available in the literature, to the best of our knowledge, none of them is able to solve large scale instances optimally. The proposed algorithm decomposes the main problem into subproblems and simultaneously allocates vehicles to a number of NP-complete subproblems. Then integer programming is employed to solve subproblems. Also, non-split and split delivery strategies are tested for the distribution. Solutions of both strategies are compared with the current performance of the firm. Results indicated considerable improvement in the performance.