A HEURISTIC ALGORITHM FOR VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM WITH BACKHAULS

We address the problem of determining the sequence of a vehicle with fixed capacity to visit n nodes at which a predetermined amount is picked up and/or delivered. The objective is to minimize the total travel distance of the vehicle, while satisfying the pick-up/delivery requirements and feasibility at all nodes. Existing methods for the problem allows the vehicle to visit a node twice, which is impractical in many real situations. We propose a heuristic algorithm, in which every node is visited exactly once. Computational results using random problems indicate that the proposed heuristic outperforms existing methods for practical range of the number of nodes in reasonable computation time.