Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem in a Supply Chain

Abstract

Vehicle routing is an important issue of logistics. It has been addressed by many researchers in different context of supply chain management. Vehicle routing problems have been also considered along with the problem of distribution planning. In the present work, the routing problem also considers distribution of products from a single depot to multiple suppliers in a specified time window. The vehicle may be of different types and capacities. This problem has been modeled as a mix integer linear programming formulations. Use of the proposed formulation is illustrated by suitable examples. Two formulations proposed in this work determine optimal logistic plan for the cases, one where number of vehicle of each type is pre specified and the second where it is to be optimally determined. Validation of the models is being carried out by varying the value of problem parameters and visualizing its effects on the objective function. The example problems very clearly demonstrate the advantages of having heterogeneous fleet of vehicle instead of homogeneous ones. © IEOM Society International. © IEOM Society International.