Route balancing vehicle routing problem with time windows for urban logistics

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) has been widely studied in operations research literature with many extensions. This paper studies VRP with time windows and route balance. The objective is to minimize the total number of routes, total cost, total distance, and total time while providing a balance between the routes. We develop a mathematical model to solve small instances of problems. For large instances of problems, we develop a heuristics algorithm. We validate the heuristic algorithm on Solomon benchmark problems. The heuristic algorithm decreases the total number of routes in the solutions by 14%, and total distance of the routes by 12%. We show that the algorithm gives successful results and can be applicable in various areas of logistics.