Multi-split delivery for the vehicle routing problem with clustering: Mathematical formulation and algorithm

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem is a problem of combinatorial optimization and operational research, which has been largely studied for many years, as well as its variants. With the increased distribution of product and service flows, many logistics applications increasingly requires customers to be grouped into clusters that facilitate delivery or any processing upstream or downstream of customers. In this article, we propose an approach using the known problem of generalized vehicle routing (GVRP) which is an extension of the problem of vehicle routing (VRP) and the problem of split delivery vehicle routing (SDVRP). The GVRP handles a set of clients grouped into separate groups, while the SDVRP allowed for split deliveries. The constraint that each customer must be visited only once is then removed. In this article, using a simple example and combining the two previous methods, we give an illustration of the problem of multisplit delivery. This example presents the new concept of problems of clustered vehicle routings that overlap with multisplit deliveries. This can be considered as an extension of previous work. We also give a mathematical formulation of this type of problem. A two-level variant will be presented, and we propose an algorithm inspired by those proposed in the references.