A study on vehicle routing problem considering joint distribution with multi-fleet -size (using hybrid heuristic of simulated annealing and Tabu Search)

In this paper we present a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) considering joint distribution, and solving through hybrid heuristic that combines Simulated Annealing with Tabu Search to approach a near optimal solution. As joint distribution is practiced among firms of different categories to avoid information leakage, trucks each firm uses usually differ in size. But none of the papers on joint distribution in the past dealt with different size trucks. So here we propose a joint distribution using existing trucks of multi-fleet -size. We use the total cost of fixed and variable truck cost as the objective function.