A new heuristic routing algorithm for fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem

Abstract

Ochi’s approach solves the heterogenous vehicle routing problem using the constraint having fixed costs as a multiplier of residuals. However, in this approach, there is not any information about which vehicle will be assigned to the route related to this constraint. In our study, Ochi’s approach is interpreted again in terms of vehicle capacity and number of customers assigned to each route. The proposed routing approach is taking the higher capacity vehicle for improving the performance. Then the solution phases of a sample problem are shown by using the given algorithm. In order to highlight the performance of the routing approach, Golden’s 12 test problems (Fleet Size and Mix Vehicle Routing Problem with Fixed Cost) are used. It is seen that the proposed method has better average time complexity and equal cost performances than Ochi’s routing approach. Therefore, the solutions with higher capacity vehicle of the proposed method that uses vehicle type information are better than those of the methods that use residual cost based on the vehicle type information.