An exact algorithm for a single-vehicle routing problem with time windows and multiple routes [An article from: European Journal of Operational Research]

This digital document is a journal article from European Journal of Operational Research, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This paper describes an exact algorithm for solving a problem where the same vehicle performs several routes to serve a set of customers with time windows. The motivation comes from the home delivery of perishable goods, where vehicle routes are short and must be combined to form a working day. A method based on an elementary shortest path algorithm with resource constraints is proposed to solve this problem. The method is divided into two phases: in the first phase, all non-dominated feasible routes are generated; in the second phase, some routes are selected and sequenced to form the vehicle workday. Computational results are reported on Euclidean problems derived from benchmark instances of the classical vehicle routing problem with time windows.