Abstract
In this paper, a useful variant of the vehicle routing problem, Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and a limited number of vehicles (m-VRPTW) is given. The problem is to serve a number of customers at minimum cost by using a limited number of vehicles, without violating the time window constraint and the vehicle capacity constraint. The feasible solution of m-VRPTW may contain some unserved customers and third-party vehicles, such as taxies, are hired to serve these unserved customers. The mixed integer programming model of m-VRPTW is proposed and a two-phase algorithm based on insertion algorithm and tabu search algorithm is proposed to solve it. Experimental results show that our algorithm can yield effective and efficient solution and be capable of dealing with the m-VRPTW problems in real life conditions.
Published Version
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