Providing Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Model Considering the Prioritized of the Customer Time Window

The vehicle routing has many uses in transportation networks and supply chain management. Each of models, which have been provided based on the classic vehicle routing, complements this basic issue and takes into account more real-world assumptions. The present research investigated the heterogeneous vehicle routing by consideration of several product distribution depots and prioritization of customers' time windows. The proposed issue had two

First, the minimization of transportation costs, and second, the reduction of customers' waiting time, thereby increasing the customer satisfaction with regard to their prioritized time windows. Given the NP-Hard nature of this two-purpose optimization issue for its solution in large dimensions, a meta-heuristic NSGA-II algorithm was used and its parameters were adjusted by Taguchi experimental design method. We also utilized two indices to evaluate the algorithm performance. The obtained results from solving issues in small and large dimensions indicated that each algorithm had a good efficiency in solving various issues especially with large sizes in a short time.