Optimizing a bi-objective vehicle routing problem that appears in industrial enterprises

Abstract

In this paper, a new solution method is implemented to solve a bi- objective variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem that appears in industry and environmental enterprises. The solution involves designing a set of routes for each day in a period, in which the service frequency is a decision variable. The proposed algorithm, the Muti-Start Multi-objective Local Search algorithm (MSMLS), minimizes total emissions produced by all ve- hicles and maximizes the service quality measured as the number of times that a customer is visited by a vehicle in order to be served. The MSMLS is a neighborhood-based metaheuristic that obtains high-quality solutions and that is capable of achieving better performance than other competi- tive algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is able to perform rapid movements thanks to the easy representation of the solutions.