A Novel Meta-Heuristic Combinatory Method for Solving Capacitated Vehicle Location-Routing Problem with Hard Time Windows

Capacitated location-routing problem (CLRP), is one of the new research areas in distribution management. This topic combines two problems: locating the facilities and vehicle routing. The goal of CLRP is to open a set of depots, allocating the costumers to depots and then to design the vehicle tours in order to minimize the overall cost. The limitations of timewindows has many applications in the realworld, however it has not been noticed enough in the CLRP problem. This article considers the capacitated location-routing problem with hard time windows (CLRPHTW). In this paper, first a mixed-integer linear programming model for CLRPHTW problem is presented and then in order to solve this problem a meta-heuristic method based on variable neighborhood search algorithm is proposed. To assess the performance of the proposed method, this framework is examined with a set of examples. The computational tests demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.