Simplified Swarm Optimization for the Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem with Time-Varying Continuous Speed Function

Abstract

Transportation planning has been established as a key topic in the literature and practices of social production, especially in urban contexts. To consider traffic environment factors, more and more researchers are taking time-varying factors into account when scheduling their logistic activities. The time-dependent vehicle routing problem (TDVRP) is an extension of the classical Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) by determining a set of optimal routes serving a set of customers within specific time windows. However, few of them use the continuous speed function to express the time-varying. In practice, many vehicle routing problems are addressed by a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles with different capacities and travel costs including fix costs and variable costs. In this study, a Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem (HFPRP) Time-Varying Continuous Speed Function has been proposed. The objective is to minimize distribution costs, which contained fixed costs of acquiring and variable fuel costs. To address this problem, our research developed a mathematical model and proposed a Simplified Swarm Optimization (SSO) heuristic for HFVRP with Time-Varying Continuous Speed Function.