Heuristic for Multi-objective Solution of the Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem

This paper presents a methodology for solving the Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (PVRP). Customer locations each with a certain daily demand are known, as well as the capacity of vehicles. In this work, the problem is solved by means of a two-phase heuristic. The first phase is the itinerary assignment to visit each customer, and in the second phase the routing is done for each day of the itinerary. The itinerary assignment is made randomly and the routing is solved using the Savings Heuristic. The problem is treated as a bi-objective problem that minimizes the total distance travelled in the time horizon, minimizing also the maximum number of routes in any day. Three instances were solved identifying the non-dominated solutions and presenting them in a graph of the Pareto front. Computational results show that the proposed approach can yield good quality solutions within reasonable running times.