Modeling of Vehicle Routing Problem with Load Balancing and Time Windows
Jianling Chen, Liangzhi Zhang, Songyan Chen · Logistics · 2009
Vehicle route scheduling is an important activity in a distribution center. It is virtually a kind of vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). An improved model of VRPTW with load balancing was therefore built. It aimed to achieve minimum vehicles, the shortest distribution distance, load balancing and customer's time demands. A two-stage heuristic method was designed. Stage I is used to find the vehicle route schedule through an improved Genetic Algorithm. A partly stochastic method to generate initial genetic population was introduced. Stage II is implemented for load balancing. The proposed model can efficiently find an optimal or suboptimal solution for medium size vehicle routing problems.