An approach based on Clustering AH and VND for Supply Chain Management

Abstract

In this work, we present a new approach to solve the Capacitated Location-Routing Problem (CLRP). The aim of this method is to determine the depot locations, to assign customers to facilities and to define routes for each depot to serve the associated clients. The proposed approach contains two phases, which are the constructive phase and the improvement phase. In the first phase, we select the depots to be opened, allocate the customers to open depots using a Hierarchical Ascendant (HA) method and we solve the vehicle routing problem for each depot using Sweep algorithm. In the second phase, we apply a Variable Neighborhood Descent (VND) with three structures in order to optimize the cost obtained by the first phase. Two sets of well-known instances from the literature are used to evaluate the performance of this method, and the numerical results obtained are compared with the experimental results of other methods. Results show that our method is competitive with respect to the best-known solutions (BKSs) and demonstrate its efficiency in comparison with other approaches.