Developing decision support system for heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing problem using hybrid heuristic

Abstract

In the last few years, there has been an increasing use of optimisation packages and decision support system (DSS) for the efficient and effective decision making. A significant variant of vehicle routing problem (VRP) arises when a fleet of vehicles is characterised by different capacities and operating costs, which is known as heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing problem (HFVRP). This paper aims at determining the optimal composition of fleet and set of routes to be accomplished by a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles for serving a given set of customers with the objective of minimising the total routing cost. To obtain the solution of the HFVRP, implementations of construction heuristics (savings algorithm, nearest neighbour, branch and cut) and improvement heuristics (2-opt and or-opt) are achieved through development of a DSS which eventually leads to proposal of a hybrid heuristic for route optimisation.