Abstract

TORO-OCAMPO, Eliana M.; DOMINGUEZ-CASTANO, Andrés H.  and  ESCOBAR-ZULUAGA, Antonio H.. Performance of clustering techniques for solving multi depot vehicle routing problem. TecnoL. [online]. 2016, vol.19, n.36, pp.49-62. ISSN 0123-7799.

The vehicle routing problem considering multiple depots is classified as NP-hard. MDVRP determines simultaneously the routes of a set of vehicles and aims to meet a set of clients with a known demand. The objective function of the problem is to minimize the total distance traveled by the routes given that all customers must be served considering capacity constraints in depots and vehicles. This paper presents a hybrid methodology that combines agglomerative clustering techniques to generate initial solutions with an iterated local search algorithm (ILS) to solve the problem.  Although previous studies clustering methods have been proposed like strategies to generate initial solutions, in this work the search is intensified on the information generated after applying the clustering technique. Besides an extensive analysis on the performance of techniques, and their effect in the final solution is performed. The operation of the proposed methodology is feasible and effective to solve the problem regarding the quality of the answers and computational times obtained on request evaluated literature.

Keywords : Combinatorial optimization; clustering techniques; distribution network; iterated local search; Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing..

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )