HEURISTIC FOR ASYMMETRIC CAPACITATED VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is commonly defined as the problem of designing optimal delivery or collection routes from one or several depots to a set of geographically scattered customers, under a variety of side conditions. This problem is generally described through a graph, whose arcs represent the road sections and vertices correspond to the depot and customer locations. The arcs (and consequently the corresponding graph) can be directed or undirected, depending on whether they can be traversed in only one direction or in both directions. Since each arc is associated with a cost then if the graph is directed, the cost matrix is asymmetric and the corresponding problem is called asymmetric vehicle routing problem (AVRP). Although the symmetric problems are special cases of the asymmetric ones, the latter were much less studied in the literature. In this paper, a type of problem, called the Asymmetric Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (ACVRP) is discussed and a heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. Keywords: Vehicle Routing, Asymmetric, Capacitated, Heuristi