Abstract
This paper proposes a new hybrid algorithm to solve the multi-compartment vehicle routing problem (MCVRP) with a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles for the fuel delivery problem of a previous study of twenty petrol stations in northeastern Thailand. The proposed heuristic is called the Fisher and Jaikumar Algorithm with Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (FJA-ALNS algorithm). The objective of this case is to minimize the total distance, while using a minimum number of multi-compartment vehicles. In the first phase, we used the FJA to solve the MCVRP for the fuel delivery problem. The results from solving the FJA were utilized to be the initial solutions in the second phase. In the second phase, a hybrid algorithm, namely the FJA-ALNS algorithm, has been developed to improve the initial solutions of the individual FJA. The results from the FJA-ALNS algorithm are compared with the exact method (LINGO software), individual FJA and individual ALNS. For small-sized problems (N=5), the results of the proposed FJA-ALNS and all methods provided no different results from the global optimal solution, but the proposed FJA-ALNS algorithm required less computational time. For larger-sized problems, LINGO software could not find the optimal solution within the limited period of computational time, while the FJA-ALNS algorithm provided better results with much less computational time. In solving the four numerical examples using the FJA-ALNS algorithm, the result shows that the proposed FJA-ALNS algorithm is effective for solving the MCVRP in this case. Undoubtedly, future work can apply the proposed FJA-ALNS algorithm to other practical cases and other variants of the VRP in real-world situations.
Highlights
The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a well-known optimization problem, which is difficult to solve, but is a very popular problem in the academic literature that many scholars are interested in, due to their ability to reduce transportation costs for organizations (Chokanat, Pitakaso, & Sethanan, 2019; Wichapa & Khokhajaikiat, 2018)
This research presents a hybrid algorithm is offered to combine the principles of Fisher and Jaikumar Algorithm (FJA) and Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) for the multi-compartment vehicle routing problem (MCVRP) with a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles for fuel delivery problem
The proposed FJA-ALNS algorithm was tested with four numerical examples
Summary
The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a well-known optimization problem, which is difficult to solve, but is a very popular problem in the academic literature that many scholars are interested in, due to their ability to reduce transportation costs for organizations (Chokanat, Pitakaso, & Sethanan, 2019; Wichapa & Khokhajaikiat, 2018). There are some special problems in which different types of commodities cannot be mixed together in the same compartment during transportation. An example of a VRP variant is a multi-compartment vehicle routing problem (MCVRP) for the fuel delivery problem, in which the context of the MCVRP for fuel delivery is to design the transport routes to deliver multiple fuels from a central depot to petrol stations, using a fleet of multi-compartment vehicles, with each compartment having different fuels that need to be kept separate. The MCVRP with a heterogeneous fleet of multi-compartment vehicles is like MCVRP, with the additional constraint that each vehicle must have various capacities of multiple commodities (Chowmali & Sukto, 2020). The fuel delivery vehicle is usually composed of multi-compartments (see Fig.1), which are used to separate one fuel type from other fuel types
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