A study on vehicle routing problem with inter loading facilities

Abstract

In this article, we discuss variant of the multi-depot vehicle routing problem where depots can act as intermediate replenishment facilities along the route of a vehicle. This problem is a generalization of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). In the sequel we developed a Lexi-Search algorithm based “Pattern Recognition Technique” to solve this problem which takes care of simple combinatorial structure of the problem and computational results are reported.In this paper, we consider a real-world problem with a loaded vehicle. The vehicle is available for pickup and delivery service. Single-commodity cargo, that is, same cargo type, is present at the customer sites. The vehicle is able to carry out a Pickup and delivery service of such cargo among the customers. By starting and ending at the origin depot, the vehicle follows a route without having a predefined sequence of Pickup and delivery services.