scholarly journals Mathematical Formulation and Comparison of Solution Approaches for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Access Time Windows

Complexity ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafael Grosso ◽  
Jesús Muñuzuri ◽  
Alejandro Escudero-Santana ◽  
Elena Barbadilla-Martín

The application of the principles of sustainability to the implementation of urban freight policies requires the estimation of all the costs and externalities involved. We focus here on the case of access time windows, which ban the access of freight vehicles to central urban areas in many European cities. Even though this measure seeks to reduce congestion and emissions in the most crowded periods of the day, it also imposes additional costs for carriers and results in higher emissions and energy consumption. We present here a mathematical model for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Access Time Windows, a variant of the VRP suitable for planning delivery routes in a city subject to this type of accessibility restriction. We use the model to find exact solutions to small problem instances based on a case study and then compare the performance over larger instances of a modified savings algorithm, a genetic algorithm, and a tabu search procedure, with the results showing no clear prevalence of any of them, but confirming the significance of those additional costs and externalities.

Author(s):  
Krittika Kantawong ◽  
Sakkayaphop Pravesjit

This work proposes an enhanced artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) to solve the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). In this work, the fuzzy technique, scatter search method, and SD-based selection method are combined into the artificial bee colony algorithm. Instead of randomly producing the new solution, the scout randomly chooses the replacement solution from the abandoned solutions from the onlooker bee stage. Effective customer location networks are constructed in order to minimize the overall distance. The proposed algorithm is tested on the Solomon benchmark dataset where customers live in different geographical locations. The results from the proposed algorithm are shown in comparison with other algorithms in the literature. The findings from the computational results are very encouraging. Compared to other algorithms, the proposed algorithm produces the best result for all testing problem sets. More significantly, the proposed algorithm obtains better quality than the other algorithms for 39 of the 56 problem instances in terms of vehicle numbers. The proposed algorithm obtains a better number of vehicles and shorter distances than the other algorithm for 20 of the 39 problem instances.


Author(s):  
Veronika Lesch ◽  
Maximilian König ◽  
Samuel Kounev ◽  
Anthony Stein ◽  
Christian Krupitzer

AbstractIn the last decades, the classical Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), i.e., assigning a set of orders to vehicles and planning their routes has been intensively researched. As only the assignment of order to vehicles and their routes is already an NP-complete problem, the application of these algorithms in practice often fails to take into account the constraints and restrictions that apply in real-world applications, the so called rich VRP (rVRP) and are limited to single aspects. In this work, we incorporate the main relevant real-world constraints and requirements. We propose a two-stage strategy and a Timeline algorithm for time windows and pause times, and apply a Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) individually to the problem to find optimal solutions. Our evaluation of eight different problem instances against four state-of-the-art algorithms shows that our approach handles all given constraints in a reasonable time.


2018 ◽  
Vol 120 ◽  
pp. 219-229
Author(s):  
Daniel Kubek

The article aims to define a model for a popular and important issue of vehicle routes planning in urban areas. The proposed model has been formulated in a multi-criteria form, which additionally takes into account reverse of good flows and soft time windows. The basic characteristics and usability of the model were analysed by numerous computational experiments. The data for experiments were based on the actual road network of the city of Krakow.


Author(s):  
Hongguang Wu ◽  
Yuelin Gao ◽  
Wanting Wang ◽  
Ziyu Zhang

AbstractIn this paper, we propose a vehicle routing problem with time windows (TWVRP). In this problem, we consider a hard time constraint that the fleet can only serve customers within a specific time window. To solve this problem, a hybrid ant colony (HACO) algorithm is proposed based on ant colony algorithm and mutation operation. The HACO algorithm proposed has three innovations: the first is to update pheromones with a new method; the second is the introduction of adaptive parameters; and the third is to add the mutation operation. A famous Solomon instance is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that HACO algorithm is effective against solving the problem of vehicle routing with time windows. Besides, the proposed algorithm also has practical implications for vehicle routing problem and the results show that it is applicable and effective in practical problems.


OR Spectrum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Tilk ◽  
Katharina Olkis ◽  
Stefan Irnich

AbstractThe ongoing rise in e-commerce comes along with an increasing number of first-time delivery failures due to the absence of the customer at the delivery location. Failed deliveries result in rework which in turn has a large impact on the carriers’ delivery cost. In the classical vehicle routing problem (VRP) with time windows, each customer request has only one location and one time window describing where and when shipments need to be delivered. In contrast, we introduce and analyze the vehicle routing problem with delivery options (VRPDO), in which some requests can be shipped to alternative locations with possibly different time windows. Furthermore, customers may prefer some delivery options. The carrier must then select, for each request, one delivery option such that the carriers’ overall cost is minimized and a given service level regarding customer preferences is achieved. Moreover, when delivery options share a common location, e.g., a locker, capacities must be respected when assigning shipments. To solve the VRPDO exactly, we present a new branch-price-and-cut algorithm. The associated pricing subproblem is a shortest-path problem with resource constraints that we solve with a bidirectional labeling algorithm on an auxiliary network. We focus on the comparison of two alternative modeling approaches for the auxiliary network and present optimal solutions for instances with up to 100 delivery options. Moreover, we provide 17 new optimal solutions for the benchmark set for the VRP with roaming delivery locations.


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