Vehicle routing from central facilities

Abstract

The problem considered in this paper is that of determining the order in which customers will be visited by delivery/pick‐up vehicles. Typical examples of this problem are the routing questions faced by the Post Office in making local deliveries, industrial laundry service companies and garbage collection agencies. Generally, in these situations, the vehicle leaves a central facility, visits a known set of customers and must return to the central facility before a specified amount of time has elapsed (e.g., a shift). In addition to these characteristics, it will be assumed that there is sufficient capacity on each vehicle for its delivery or pick‐up requirements during the available time and the customers are indifferent as to when the vehicle arrives during this time. The problem is to assign customers to routes for individual vehicles so as to minimize the total travel time for all vehicles, without having any vehicle exceed the amount of time available.

Citation

O'NEIL, B.F. and CLAY WHYBARK, D. (1972), "Vehicle routing from central facilities", International Journal of Physical Distribution, Vol. 2 No. 2, pp. 93-97. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb038860