A Hybrid Meta-heuristic Approach for the Capacitated Location-Routing Problem with Hard Time Windows

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Abstract

The capacitated location-routing problem (CLRP) is a new research area in logistics and distribution management. This problem combines two difficult problems: the facility location problem (FLP) and vehicle routing problem (VRP). The goal of the CLRP is to open a subset of depots, assign the customers into open facilities, and then design vehicle tours in order to minimize the total cost. The time windows constraint has numerous real-life applications, however there are little attention to this fact in the CLRP. This paper, considers the CLRP with hard time windows (CLRPHTW). At first, a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulations for the CLRPHTW is presented, then a meta-heuristic approach based on variable neighborhood search for solving the CLRPHTW is proposed. In order to evaluate the performance of the suggested method, this framework is tested on a set of instances. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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