The vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is a representation of a wellknown transportation problem. It involves customers, depot, vehicles and constraints on delivery time (time windows) and capacity on vehicles. To minimize cost, the solution of a VRPTW problem must satisfy all the constraints while minimising the total distance for the lowest number of vehicles. Clearly an order ...

This paper describes an agent-based platform for the allocation of loads in distributed transportation logistics, developed as a collaboration between CWI, Dutch National Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam and Vos Logistics Organizing, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The platform follows a real business scenario proposed by Vos, and it involves a set of agents bidding for transpo...

Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a key element of many transportation systems which involve routing of fleet of vehicles from a depot to a set of customers node. It is required that these vehicles return to the depot after serving customers’ demand. This paper investigates a relaxed version of VRP, in which the number of visits to the customer is not restricted to be at most one. The relaxed ve...

We study a class of vehicle-routing problems (VRP) with simultaneous pickup and delivery (VRPSPD). In VRPSPDs, each customer may require a certain quantity of goods delivered from the depot and a quantity of goods to be picked up and returned to the depot. Besides the standard VRPSPD, we address (i) the VRPSPD with time limit (VRPSPDTL), which imposes a time limit on the routes of the transport...

Gordon et all-3 suggested that the transport of depot fat to the site of utilization probably takes place in the form of free fatty acid (unesterified fatty acid). Under both normal and abnormal circumstances, the amount of free fatty acid is very small in the serum and liver occupying only 1/4-1/5 of triglyceride or phospholipid. The portion derived from dietary fat is transported mainly in th...

Consider a congested urban logistics network with one depot and many geographically dispersed retailers facing demands at constant and deterministic rate over a period of planning horizon, but the lead time is variable due to traffic congestion. All stock enters the logistics network through the depot and from where it is distributed to the retailers by a fleet of vehicles. In this paper, we pr...