The emergence of metaheuristics for solving diÆcult combinatorial optimization problems is one of the most notable achievements of the last two decades in operations research. This paper provides an account of the most recent developments in the eld and identi es some common issues and trends. Examples of applications are also reported for vehicle routing and scheduling problems.

Multi-vehicle routing has become increasingly important with the rapid development in autonomous vehicle technology. Dial-a-ride problem, a variant of vehicle routing problem (VRP), deals with the allocation of customer requests to vehicles, scheduling the pick-up and drop-off times and the sequence of serving those requests by ensuring high customer satisfaction with minimized travel cost. In ...

We present the problem of planning mobile tours of inspectors on German motorways to enforce the payment of the toll for heavy good trucks. This is a special type of vehicle routing problem with the objective to conduct as good inspections as possible on the complete network. In addition, we developed a personalized crew rostering model, to schedule the crews of the tours. The planning of daily...

This paper proposes an abstraction of emerging vehicle routing problems, the Vehicle Routing Problem with Black Box Feasibility. In this problem the routes of a basic VRP need to satisfy an unknown set of constraints. A black box function to test the feasibility of a route is provided. This function is considered of non-linear complexity (in the length of the route). Practical examples of such ...

periodic vehicle routing problem focuses on establishing a plan of visits to clients over a given time horizon so as to satisfy some service level while optimizing the routes used in each time period. this paper presents a new effective heuristic algorithm based on data mining tools for periodic vehicle routing problem (pvrp). the related results of proposed algorithm are compared with the resu...

vehicle routing problem (vrp) is one of the major problems in the transportation and distribution planning. in the most previous studies, the objective of vrp models was distance and vehicle related costs. however in many industrial cases along with routing distance, vehicle loading amount is a factor of cost function. in this paper, we formulate a mixed integer non-linear programming (minlp) m...

We investigate the implementation of edge-exchange improvement methods for the vehicle routing problem with time windows with minimization of route duration as the objective. The presence of time windows as well as the chosen objective cause verification of the feasibility and profitability of a single edge-exchange to require an amount of computing time that is linear in the number of vertices...

The purpose of this research is to present a new mathematical modeling for a vehicle routing problem considering concurrently the criteria such as distance, weight, traffic considerations, time window limitation, and heterogeneous vehicles in the reverse logistics network for collection of expired products. In addition, we aim to present an efficient solution approach according to differential ...