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...

In this paper, a new approach to risk minimizing vehicle routing and scheduling problem is presented. Forwarding agents or companies have two main concerns for the collection of high-risk commodities like cash or valuable commodities between the central depot and the customers: one; because of the high value of the commodities transported, the risk of ambush and robbery are very high. Two; the ...

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...

In this paper, a new algorithm for solving the single loop routing problem is presented. The purpose of the single loop routing problem(SLRP) is to find the shortest loop for an automated guided vehicle covering at least one edge of each department of a block layout. First it shown that this problem can be represented as a graph model. Then a meta-heuristic algorithm based on and colony system ...

One of the most important points in a supply chain is customer-driven modeling, which reduces the bullwhip effect in the supply chain, as well as the costs of investment on the inventory and efficient transshipment of the products. Their homogeneity is reflected in the Inventory Routing Problem, which is a combination of distribution and inventory management. This paper expands the classical In...