APPROACHES FOR THE VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM WITH SIMULTANEOUS DELIVERIES AND PICKUPS

Abstract

ABSTRACT The vehicle routing problem with backhauls deals with the delivery and pickup of goods at different customer locations. In many practical situations, however, the same customer may require both a delivery of goods from the central depot and a pickup of recycled/outdated items. In this paper, a parallel-insertion procedure is presented to obtain a quick solution for the vehicle routing problem with deliveries and pickups. A hybrid heuristic based on the simulated annealing method, tabu lists, and route improvement procedures is also proposed to improve the obtained solution. Computational characteristics of the proposed insertion-based procedure and the hybrid heuristic are evaluated through computational experiments. Computational experiments show that the parallel-insertion procedure obtains better solutions than those found in the open literature. Computational results also indicate that the proposed hybrid heuristic is able to reduce the gap between the obtained initial solution and optimal solution effectively and outperforms a metaheuristic tested in terms of solution quality, and is capable of obtaining optimal solutions very efficiently for small-scaled problems.