Planning Freight Delivery Routes in Mountainous Regions

Abstract

The planning of delivery routes in mountainous areas should pay attention to the fact that certain types of vehicles (such as large trucks) may be unable to reach some customers. The use of heterogeneous fleet is then a must. Moreover, the costs of a given route may be very different depending on the sense taken. The site-dependent capacitated vehicle routing problem with heterogeneous fleet and asymmetric costs is solved with the successive approximations method. The solution methodology proposed is tested on a set of benchmark instances. Preliminary tests carried out show the benefits, in terms of total costs, when using a heterogeneous fleet. In both cases, with and without site dependency, the increase in distance-based costs is mitigated by the use of heterogeneous fleet.