Abstract

The Refrigerated Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (RCVRP) considers a homogeneous fleet with a refrigerated system to decide the selection of routes to be performed according to customers' requirements. The aim is to keep the energy consumption of the routes as low as possible. We use a thermodynamic model to understand the unloading of products from trucks and the variables' efficiency, such as the temperature during the day influencing energy consumption. By considering various neighborhoods and a shaking procedure, this paper proposes a Granular Tabu Search scheme to solve the RCVRP. Computational tests using adapted benchmark instances from the literature demonstrate that the suggested method delivers high-quality solutions within short computing times, illustrating the refrigeration system's effect on routing decisions.

Highlights

  • The globalization of the markets has forced companies to be more efficient and productive in their distribution and operation processes

  • Successful algorithms based on the idea of granularity for solving different variations of the vehicle routing problem have been proposed by Linfati et al (2014) and Puenayán et al (2014)

  • This paper proposes a granular tabu search approach for the Refrigerated Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (RCVRP)

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Summary

Introduction

The globalization of the markets has forced companies to be more efficient and productive in their distribution and operation processes. It is essential to know and identify the different thermal phenomena during the vehicle's route that affect the truck's internal temperature and generate higher energy consumption. For the CVRP problem considering a homogeneous and refrigerated fleet, it is essential to take into account the consideration of routing decisions in terms of distance and concerning other aspects, such as the influence of air infiltration from outside and the influence of heat from the outside environment on the internal load of the trucks (Fourier's law). The proposed algorithm's main body is divided into two sections: (I) constructing an initial solution using a hybrid method and (II) a granular tabu search scheme to refine the initial solution obtained in (I) The former algorithm considers modern methods for determining the route's thermal conditions for the RCVRP.

Review of Literature
Thermal considerations of the problem
Thermal load calculation by transmission
Thermal load calculation by infiltration
Model for calculating fuel consumption
Granular search algorithm
Initial Solution
Granular search space
Neighborhood structures
Perturbation procedure
Thermal Considerations
Incidence of energy consumption
Analysis of results
Findings
Concluding Remarks

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