Solving the Time Dependent Vehicle Routing Problem by Metaheuristic Algorithms

The problem we consider in this study is Time Dependent Vehicle Routing Problem (TDVRP) which has been categorized as non-classical VRP. It is motivated by the fact that multinational companies are currently not only manufacturing the demanded products but also distributing them to the customer location. This implies an efficient synchronization of production and distribution activities. Hence, this study will look into the routing of vehicles which departs from the depot at varies time due to the variation in manufacturing process. We consider a single production line where demanded products are being process one at a time once orders have been received from the customers. It is assumed that order released from the production line will be loaded into scheduled vehicle which ready to be delivered. However, the delivery could only be done once all orders scheduled in the vehicle have been released from the production line. Therefore, there could be lateness on the delivery process from awaiting all customers' order of the route to be released. Our objective is to determine a schedule for vehicle routing that minimizes the solution cost including the travelling and tardiness cost. A mathematical formulation is developed to represent the problem and will be solved by two metaheuristics; Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) and Tabu Search (TS). These algorithms will be coded in C++ programming and run using 56' s Solomon instances with some modification. The outcome of this experiment can be interpreted as the quality criteria of the different approximation methods. The comparison done shown that VNS gave the better results while consuming reasonable computational efforts.