delivering perishable products to customers as soon as possible and with the minimum cost has been always a challenge for producers and has been emphasized over recent years due to the global market becoming more competitive. in this paper a multi-objective mix integer non-linear programming model is proposed to maximize both profits of a distributer and the total freshness of the several produ...

Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is addressed to a class of problems for determining a set of vehicle routes, in which each vehicle departs from a given depot, serves a given set of customers, and returns back to the same depot. On the other hand, simultaneous delivery and pickup problems have drawn much attention in the past few years due to its high usage in real world cases. This study, therefo...

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 ...

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 investigates a well-known complex combinatorial problem known as the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). Unlike the standard vehicle routing problem, each customer in the VRPTW is served within a given time constraint. This paper solves the VRPTW using an improved artificial bee colony (IABC) algorithm. The performance of this algorithm is improved by a local optimizat...

The analytic center cutting plane method (ACCPM) is one of successful methods to solve nondifferentiable optimization problems. In this paper ACCPM is used for the first time in the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) to accelerate lagrangian relaxation procedure for the problem. At first the basic cutting plane algorithm and its relationship with column generation method is clari...

The article presents the memetic SOM, an evolutionary algorithm embedding self-organizing maps as operators to address the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). We show that it allows to extend the self-organizing map to deal with a version of the vehicle routing problem with time windows where the number of vehicles is an input, and by adding some walking distance from customers t...

The linehaul-feeder vehicle routing problem with virtual depots and time windows (LFVRPTW) is a new version of city logistics. Four important issues are explored and fifteen sample examples used for demonstration. First, the LFVRPTW always yields better results than the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). Second, LFVRPTW is advantageous compared with VRPTW. Third, more virtual de...