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A novel approach to solve the split delivery vehicle routing problem
Author(s) -
Chen Ping,
Golden Bruce,
Wang Xingyin,
Wasil Edward
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
international transactions in operational research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.032
H-Index - 52
eISSN - 1475-3995
pISSN - 0969-6016
DOI - 10.1111/itor.12250
Subject(s) - vehicle routing problem , heuristics , computer science , benchmark (surveying) , a priori and a posteriori , mathematical optimization , routing (electronic design automation) , state (computer science) , algorithm , mathematics , computer network , philosophy , geodesy , epistemology , geography
The split delivery vehicle routing problem (SDVRP) is a relaxed version of the classic capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP). Customer demands are allowed to split among vehicles. This problem is computationally challenging and the state‐of‐the‐art heuristics are often complicated to describe and difficult to implement, and usually have long computing times. All these hinder their application by practitioners to solve real‐world problems. We propose a novel, efficient, and easily implemented approach to solve the SDVRP using an a priori split strategy, that is, each customer demand is split into small pieces in advance. Our computational experiments on 82 benchmark instances show that our algorithm is overall much more efficient and produces results that are comparable to those from the state‐of‐the‐art approaches.