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 other objectives addition to this common primary objective. This paper describes a multi-objective model for VRPB with time windows (VRPBTW) and some new assumptions. We present a goal programming approach and a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. Computational experiments are carried out and performance of developed methods is discussed.