Article ID: | iaor20135473 |
Volume: | 65 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 37 |
End Page Number: | 48 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2014 |
Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
Authors: | Wang Z, Liang W, Hu X |
Keywords: | metaheuristics, time windows |
This paper studies the vehicle routing problem with multiple trips and time windows, in which vehicles are allowed to perform multiple trips during a scheduling period and each customer must be served within a given time interval. The problem is of particular importance for planning fleets of hired vehicles in common practices, such as e‐grocery distributions, but this problem has received little attention in the literature. As a result of the multi‐layered structure characteristic of the problem solution, we propose a pool‐based metaheuristic in which various routes are first constructed to fill a pool, following which some of the routes are selected and combined to form vehicle working schedules. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments over a set of benchmark instances to evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metaheuristic.