in this paper we address the vrpcd, in which a set of homogeneous vehicles are used to transport products from the suppliers to customers via a cross-dock. the products can be consolidated at the cross-dock but cannot be stored for very long as the cross-dock does not have long-term inventory-holding capabilities. the objective of the vrpcd is to minimize the total traveled distance while respe...

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 othe...

customer service level is of prime importance in today competitive world and has various dimensions with delivery quality being one of the most important ones. delivery quality has several parameters such as deliver time window options, time window size, etc. in this paper we focus on one of these parameters, namely time window setting. it has a direct impact upon customer satisfaction and busi...

In this article, multiple-product PVRP with pickup and delivery that is used widely in goods distribution or other service companies, especially by railways, was introduced. A mathematical formulation was provided for this problem. Each product had a set of vehicles which could carry the product and pickup and delivery could simultaneously occur. To solve the problem, two meta-heuristic methods...

Inventory routing problems arise as simultaneous decisions in inventory and routing optimization. In the present study, vendor managed inventory is proposed as a collaborative model for reverse supply chains and the optimization problem is modeled in terms of an inventory routing problem. The studied reverse supply chains include several return generators and recovery centers and one collection...