Abstract
This research presents a variant of the vehicle routing problem known as the path cover problem with time windows (PCPTW), in which each vehicle starts with a particular customer and finishes its route at another customer. The vehicles serve each customer within the customer’s time windows. PCPTW is motivated by a practical strategy for companies to reduce operational cost by hiring freelance workers, thus allowing workers to directly service customers without reporting to the office. A mathematical programming model is formulated for the problem. This research also proposes a simulated annealing heuristic with restart strategy (SARS) to solve PCPTW and test it on several benchmark datasets. Computational results indicate that the proposed SARS effectively solves PCPTW.
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