A Near-Optimal Solution for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Multiple Use of Vehicles(<Special English Issue>Production and Logistics)

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem with multiple use of vehicles is a variant of the classical vehicle routing problem in which vehicles can be used several times during a working day. We propose a method to determine the lower bound of this problem by solving the degree-constrained minimum γ-tree problem and the 0-1 knapsack problem. We also propose a method to determine a near-optimal solution to the problem by successively decreasing the difference between the upper and lower bounds. Numerical experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.