A Two-phase Method for the Vehicle Routing Problems with Time Windows

This paper presents a two-phase method for the vehicle routing problems with time windows(VRPTW). In a supply chain management(SCM) environment, timely distribution is very important problem faced by most industries. The VRPTW is associated with SCM for each customer to be constrained the time of service. In the VRPTW, the objective is to design the least total travel time routes for a fleet of identical capacitated vehicles to service geographically scattered customers with pre-specified service time windows. The proposed approach is based on ant colony optimization(ACO) and improvement heuristic. In the first phase, an insertion based ACO is introduced for the route construction and its solutions is improved by an iterative random local search in the second phase. Experimental results show that the proposed two-phase method obtains very good solutions with respect to total travel time minimization.

시간대 제약이 있는 차량경로 결정문제를 위한 2단계 해법의 개발