This paper presents an advanced hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm (HMA) to solve the vehicle routing problem with backhauls and time windows (VRPBTW). The VRPBTW is an extension of the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) and the vehicle routing problem with backhauls (VRPB) that includes capacity, backhaul and time window constraints. In this problem, the customers are divided into ...

The objective of vehicle routing problem (VRP) is to design a set of vehicle routes in which a fixed fleet of delivery vehicles from one or several depots to a number of customers have to be set with some constraints. To this date in the literature, many instances of VRP model have been introduced and applied for various types of scheduling problems. However, when implemented in a real life app...

In home health care (HHC) services, nurses or professional caregivers are dispatched to patients’ homes to provide medical care services, such that each patient can stay at home to be treated periodically. The HHC problem consists of the nurse rostering problem (NRP) and the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), both of which are NP-hard problems, which are harder or equal to the h...

This paper aims to study the locomotive routing problem (LRP) which is one of the most important problems in railroad scheduling in view of involving expensive assets and high cost of operating locomotives. This problem is assigning a fleet of locomotives to a network of trains to provide sufficient power to pull them from their origins to destinations by satisfying a rich set of operational con...

The multiple vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is a hard and extensively studied combinatorial optimization problem. This paper considers a dynamic VRPTW with stochastic customers, where the goal is to maximize the number of serviced customers. It presents a multiple scenario approach (MSA) that continuously generates routing plans for scenarios including known and future reques...

The vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is an extension of the well-known vehicle routing problem with a central depot. The objective is to design an optimal set of routes that services all customers and satisfies the given constraints, especially the time window constraints. The objective function considered here combines the minimization of the number of vehicles (primary criter...

Most solution methods for the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) develop routes from the earliest feasible departure time. However, in practice, temporal traffic congestions make that such solutions are not optimal with respect to minimizing the total duty time. Furthermore, VRPTW solutions do not account for complex driving hours regulations, which severely restrict the daily tr...

The vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is an important problem in third-party logistics and supply chain management. We extend the VRPTW to the VRPTW with overtime and outsourcing vehicles (VRPTWOV), which allows overtime for drivers and the possibility of using outsourced vehicles. This problem can be applied to third-party logistics companies for managing central distributor-lo...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the design and implementation of comprehensive mission planning systems for swarms of autonomous aerial vehicles (UAV). Such a system could integrate several problem domains including path planning, vehicle routing, and swarm behavior as based upon a hierarchical architecture. The example developed system consists of a parallel multi-objective evolutionar...