Vehicle Routing Problem with Multi-type Vehicles in the Cold Chain Logistics System

Abstract

In this paper, a multi-objective model aiming to minimize both distribution cost and cargo damage cost is constructed to study the vehicle routing problem (VRP) with multi-type vehicles in the cold chain logistics system. Since VRP is an NP-hard problem, the optimal solutions cannot be obtained in a short time with exact algorithms as the scale increases. The genetic algorithms based on two decoding methods giving the priority to capacity and cargo damage are designed to solve the problem. The algorithm is applied to solve the distribution problem of H logistics company and the results obtained with two decoding methods are compared.