Approximate Algorithm for Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing

We study the two-echelon vehicle routing problem, in which the delivery to customers from a depot with transits through satellites. The goal is to find the minimum total routing cost and minimize the cost of single point of demand, more precisely, to find an approximate algorithm minimizing the approximation ratio, which compares the performance of this approximate algorithm with the optimal solution. In this paper, we describe a formulation for this problem and present an approximate algorithm GA to find the minimum total routing cost. We prove approximation ratio for the algorithm GA. Finally, we conduct extensive computational experiments to measure the performance of the approximate algorithm GA, the computational results indicate that the approximate algorithm GA can effectively solve various instances of the problem.