Solving the heterogeneous vehicle routing problem with time windows and multiple products via a bacterial meta-heuristic
by Jaime E. Amador-Fontalvo; Carlos D. Paternina-Arboleda; Jairo R. Montoya-Torres
International Journal of Advanced Operations Management (IJAOM), Vol. 6, No. 1, 2014

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to solve a variant of the vehicle routing problem with heterogeneous fleet, time windows, and multiple products (HVRPTWMP), using a novel meta-heuristic based on the behaviour of the bacteria to the stimulus of light. The meta-heuristic recreates the different processes that make a bacterium to be as close as possible to a light source, considered as the objective to reach. The problem is associated with two objectives: the minimisation of the number of vehicle and the total travelled distance. The proposed meta-heuristic was tested on instances from literature with sizes of up to 100 nodes (clients). Results show that the proposed algorithm gives good quality solutions in regard of both objective functions.

Online publication date: Wed, 02-Jul-2014

The full text of this article is only available to individual subscribers or to users at subscribing institutions.

 
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.

Pay per view:
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.

Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Advanced Operations Management (IJAOM):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:

Username:        Password:          Forgotten your password?

Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.

If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com