On the Selective Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract

The Generalized Vehicle Routing Problem (GVRP) is an extension of the classical Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), in which we are looking for an optimal set of delivery or collection routes from a given depot to a number of customers divided into predefined, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive clusters, visiting exactly one customer from each cluster and fulfilling the capacity restrictions. This paper deals with a more generic version of the GVRP, introduced recently and called Selective Vehicle Routing Problem (SVRP). This problem generalizes the GVRP in the sense that the customers are divided into clusters, but they may belong to one or more clusters. The aim of this work is to describe a novel mixed integer programming based mathematical model of the SVRP. To validate the consistency of the novel mathematical model, a comparison between the proposed model and the existing models from literature is performed, on the existing benchmark instances for SVRP and on a set of additional benchmark instances used in the case of GVRP and adapted for SVRP. The proposed model showed better results against the existing models.