OR Practice—Computerized Vehicle Routing in the Soft Drink Industry

Solving a vehicle-routing problem arising in soft-drink distribution

The problem studied in this article arises from the distribution of soft drinks and collection of recyclable containers in a Quebec based company. It can be modeled as a variant of the vehicle routing problem with a heterogeneous vehicle fleet, time windows, capacity and volume constraints, and an objective function combining routing costs and the revenue resulting from the sale of recyclable m...

Product Differentiation and Mergers in the Carbonated Soft Drink Industry

I simulate the competitive impact of several soft drink mergers from the 1980s on equilibrium prices and quantities. An unusual feature of soft drink demand is that, at the individual purchase level, households regularly select a variety of soft drink products. Specifically, on a given trip households may select multiple soft drink products and multiple units of each. A concern is that using a ...

A goal programming model for vehicle routing problem with backhauls and soft time windows

The vehicle routing problem with backhauls (VRPB) as an extension of the classical vehicle routing prob-lem (VRP) attempts to define a set of routes which services both linehaul customers whom product are to be delivered and backhaul customers whom goods need to be collected. A primary objective for the problem usually is minimizing the total distribution cost. Most real-life problems have othe...

A multi-criteria vehicle routing problem with soft time windows by simulated annealing

This paper presents a multi-criteria vehicle routing problem with soft time windows (VRPSTW) to mini-mize fleet cost, routes cost, and violation of soft time windows penalty. In this case, the fleet is heterogene-ous. The VRPSTW consists of a number of constraints in which vehicles are allowed to serve customers out of the desirable time window by a penalty. It is assumed that this relaxation a...

Appendix for: Product Differentiation and Mergers in the Carbonated Soft Drink Industry