An employee transporting problem and its heuristic solutions

A typical Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) can be described as a problem of designing the least cost routes from one depot to a set of geographically scattered points. The VRP assumes that the vehicle capacities are identical, yet in real life the vehicle capacities are different. Therefore, this thesis presents a study of VRP with heterogeneous vehicles (HVRP). A lower bound on the cost of vehicles and routing is calculated for the HVRP using some mathematical models. Various heuristics are attempted to decide which one provides better solutions on the average. The better heuristic is selected based on the deviation from the lower bound. A simple software is prepared using the best heuristic methods for the employee pickup and delivery operations of a hypothetical company.