The vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and pick-up with material flows among customers and heuristic solution

The vehicle routing problems with simultaneous delivery and pick-up and material flows among customers is the combination of the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and pick-up and the pickup and delivery problems. In these problems, custumers are able to send materials to each other. In daily life, we are confronted with this problem. For exemple, a hypermarket has to transport not only the materials initially available at its depot to its agencies as well as those from the agencies to the depot, but also extra materials available at their agencies to each other because of demand fluctuations. In this thesis, the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and pickup and material flows among customers has been defined, a new heuristic algorithm has been suggested to solve this type of problems, an MATLAB codes of the proposed algorithm have been developed, and finally 60 author-generated test instances have been solved using four different insertion criterion in the literature. Key Words : Vehicle routing, simultaneous delivery and pick-up, pickup and delivery problems