Abstract:

One of the most important operational decisions in logistics management is the determination of the routes of the vehicle to serve customers. Vehicle Rotation Problem (ARP) can be defined as the determination of the most suitable routes to meet the customer’s distribution (collection) requirements from a warehouse. In real-life logistics applications, the vehicles in the fleet can be in different features. Requirements from customers/transporters may also reveal the obligation to use the vehicle in different characteristics. In addition, companies are more concerned about the management of the reverse flow of goods, semiprodukts and raw materials due to both their economic return and their legal and environmental obligations. In this article, a type of ARP has been studied where there is a heterogeneous vehicle fleet and the circumstances where customers’ distribution and collection requests occur simultaneously are taken into account together. This problem is called the heterogeneous simultaneous collective-distribution vehicle rotation problem (HETD-ARP). HETD-ARP can be defined as the determination of the routes of the vehicle that reduce the total cost and the type of vehicle used on each route. For the problem, a flow-based mathematical model with the number of polynoms is recommended. Because HETD-ARP is in the NP-hard problems class, it’s hard to find the best solution even to medium-dimensional problems in reasonable times. Therefore, this article suggests a simple founder intuitive algorithm for the solution of medium and large-sized HETD-ARP. This algorithm is adapted to the HETD-ARP of the Clarke-Wright Saving (CWT) algorithm recommended for ARP in sources. The effectiveness of the recommended mathematical model and intuitive algorithm has been studied on test problems.

Keywords: