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A new approach for solution of vehicle routing problem with hard time window: an application in a supermarket chain

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Abstract

In this study, a vehicle routing problem with hard time windows (VRPHTW) that appears to meet demands of customers’ service within time intervals in a supermarket chain is solved. In VRPHTW, to reach a solution by an exact method is quite difficult and sometimes impossible if number of constraints is large enough (i.e., NP-hard), and solution time of a VRPHTW grows exponentially. As the size of the problem grows, a near optimal solution can be found using a heuristic method. A hierarchical approach consisting of two stages as “cluster-first route-second” is proposed. In the first stage, customers are assigned to vehicles using three different clustering algorithms (i.e., K-means, K-medoids and DBSCAN). In the second stage, a VRPHTW is solved using a MILP. The main contribution of the article is that the proposed hierarchical approach enables us to deal with a large size real problem and to solve it in a short time using the exact method. Finally, the proposed approach is employed on a supermarket chain. An instance of the algorithm is demonstrated to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach and the results obtained are highly favourable.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Engineering, Sakarya University, Sakarya, Turkey

    SERAP ERCAN CÖMERT, HARUN REŞİT YAZGAN, İREM SERTVURAN & HANİFE ŞENGÜL

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  1. SERAP ERCAN CÖMERT
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  2. HARUN REŞİT YAZGAN
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CÖMERT, S.E., YAZGAN, H.R., SERTVURAN, İ. et al. A new approach for solution of vehicle routing problem with hard time window: an application in a supermarket chain. Sādhanā 42, 2067–2080 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12046-017-0754-1

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