Given a fleet of vehicles assigned to a single depot, the vehicle routing problem with time windows (vrptw) consists of determining a set of feasible routes to deliver goods to a set of customers while minimizing, first, the number of vehicles used and, second, total mileage. Each customer must be visited exactly once by a vehicle within a prescribed time interval. A route starts from the depot...

We present a unified heuristic which is able to solve five different variants of the vehicle routing problem: the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), the multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP), the site-dependent vehicle routing problem (SDVRP) and the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP). All problemvariants are transformed int...

Vehicle routing optimization (VRO) designs the best routes to reduce travel cost, energy consumption, and carbon emission. Due to non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) complexity, many VROs involved in real-world applications require too much computing effort. Shortening computing time for VRO is a great challenge for state-of-the-art spatial optimization algorithms. From a spatial-t...

In this paper, we present a multiagent model in which agents have a perception upon their shared environment, a measure is associated to the agents’ perception field. We apply the model on the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW). The overall process adopts the general schema of parallel insertion methods and it uses the contracting of perception’s field of the vehicle agents as a ...

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) is a well-know and complex combinatorial problem, which has received considerable attention in recent years. This problem has been addressed using many different techniques including both exact and heuristic methods. The VRPTW benchmark problems of Solomon (1987) have been most commonly chosen to evaluate and to compare all solutions propose...

In this paper, we propose the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Mixed Fleet (E-VRPTWMF) to optimize the routing of a mixed fleet of electric commercial vehicles (ECVs) and conventional internal combustion commercial vehicles (ICCVs). Contrary to existing routing models for ECVs, which assume energy consumption to be a linear function of traveled distance, we utilize a reali...

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...

A new model and solution for the energy minimizing vehicle routing problem with time windows (EVRPTW) and customers’ priority is presented in this paper. In this paper unlike prior attempts to minimize cost by minimizing overall traveling distance, the model also incorporates energy minimizing which meets the latest requirements of green logistics. This paper includes the vehicles load as an ad...