The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a class of well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimisation problems. The VRP is concerned with the design of the optimal routes, used by a fleet of identical vehicles stationed at a central depot to serve a set of customers with known demands. In the basic version of the problem, known as a Capacitated VRP (CVRP), only capacity restrictions for vehicles are co...

Combinatorial optimization games form an important subclass of cooperative games. In recent years, increased attention has been given to the issue of finding good cost shares for such games. In this paper, we define a very general class of games, called integer minimization games, which includes the combinatorial optimization games in the literature as special cases. We then present new techniq...

Since the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) was introduced by Dantzig and Ramser, it became one of the most studied problems in Combinatorial Optimization. Different solution approaches were proposed over the past decades to solve the VRP and its variants. In this thesis, we discuss about two VRP variants, resulting from the integration of VRPs with distribution problems. The first problem takes pl...

An efficient approach to solve engineering optimization problems is the cuckoo search algorithm. It is a recently developed meta-heuristic optimization algorithm. Normally, the parameters of the cuckoo search are kept constant. This may result in decreasing the efficiency of the algorithm. To cope with this issue, the cuckoo search parameters should be tuned properly. In this paper, an improved...

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a difficult and well-studied combinatorial optimization problem. We develop a parallel algorithm for the VRP that combines a heuristic local search improvement procedure with integer programming. We run our parallel algorithm with as many as 129 processors and are able to quickly find high-quality solutions to standard benchmark problems. We assess the impac...

Vehicle Routing problem (VRP) is the challenging and sophisticated optimization problem which can be solved by various approaches like Exact methods, metaheuristic optimization algorithm and Mathematical approaches including linear and integer programming Techniques. Exact algorithms can only solve relatively small problems of VRP. Several approximate algorithms have proven successfully to find...