Vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickups and deliveries
AbstractIn this study, we address a scheduling problem. The addressed scheduling problem is one of the special cases of the classical vehicle routing problem. The problem consists of pickups and deliveries and divided into two different categories; (i) simultaneous or (ii) mixed pickups and deliveries. (i) In the simultaneous form, demand customers may both receive and send goods comparing to (ii) the mixed form in which the customers may have either pickup or delivery demand. In this study, we develop a hybrid heuristic to solve the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickups and deliveries. The heuristic approach brings the complementary strengths of single solution based heuristics such as Simulated Annealing, Great Deluge, Threshold Accepting, Greedy, Random Search with population based Generic Algorithms. The proposed hybrid heuristic is tested on well-known benchmark instances in the literature. The computational results show that the proposed heuristic is effective in solving the problem.