Vehicle routing and scheduling – The traveling salesman problem

Abstract

The classification of routing and scheduling problems depends on certain characteristics of the service delivery system, such as size of the delivery fleet, where the fleet is housed, capacities of the vehicles, and routing and scheduling objectives. In the simplest case, we begin with a set of nodes to be visited by a single vehicle. The nodes may be visited in any order, there are no precedence relationships, the travel costs between two nodes are the same regardless of the direction traveled, and there are no delivery-time restrictions. In addition, vehicle capacity is not considered. The output for the single-vehicle problem is a route or a tour where each node is visited only once and the route begins and ends at the depot node. The tour is formed with the goal of minimizing the total tour cost. This simplest case is referred to as a traveling salesman problem (TSP). An extension of the traveling salesman problem, referred to as the multiple traveling salesman problems (MTSP), occurs when a fleet of vehicles must be routed from a single depot. The goal is to generate a set of routes, one for each vehicle in the fleet. The characteristics of this problem are that a node may be assigned to only one vehicle, but a vehicle will have more than one node assigned to it. There are no restrictions on the size of the load or number of passengers a vehicle may carry. The solution to this problem will give the order in which each vehicle is to visit its assigned nodes. As in the single-vehicle case, the objective is to develop the set of minimum-cost routes, where “cost” may be represented by a dollar amount, distance, or travel time. If we now restrict the capacity of the multiple vehicles and couple with it the possibility of having varying demands at each node, the problem is classified as a vehicle routing problem (VRP). In this paper will be presenteds the TSP procedure for delivery and routing of new product L-carnitine from Koding – Skopje which life development is in the introduction or development phase

    Similar works