Certain investigations on vehicle routing with enhanced and efficient optimization techniques

Abstract

Logistics plays a substantial role in distribution management where the goods distribution from the central depot area and production centres is resolved by handling the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). It is an essential field of research in the operations research community and an NP-hard-based optimization problem. VRP aims to model a cost-effectual route over the homogeneous vehicles that are depot to serve the set of distributed customers geographically. The routing commences and ends up with the central distribution service centre by servicing every customer and returning to the depot. To enable this routing, several objectives like cost, driving path, number of vehicles used and waiting time of vehicles needs to be considered. To handle these multi-objective constraints, various meta-heuristic optimization approaches are modelled. As VRP provides various solutions, many investigators have provided various solutions for resolving the multi- objective constraints. Some of the conventional methods involve the diverse variants of VRP, like VRP with Time Windows (VRPTW), VRP with Pickup and Delivery (VRPPD) and Multi Depot VRP (MDVRP). Along with these conventional variants, some newer objectives like waiting time and constraints that resolve the real-time problems are included in VRP, i.e. hazardous materials transportation and routing, pollution routing problems, environment-friendly routing, perishable goods routing, and emergency routing. The major concentration of this research is to model an efficient approach to deal with the multi-objective constraints and to provide an optimal or global solution to those constraints effectually. newline