Single-Commodity Vehicle Routing Problem with Pickup and Delivery Service

We present a novel variation of the vehicle routing problem (VRP). Single commodity cargo with pickup and delivery service is considered. Customers are labeled as either cargo sink or cargo source, depending on their pickup or delivery demand. This problem is called a single commodity vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery service (1-VRPPD). 1-VRPPD deals with multiple vehicles and is the same as the single-commodity traveling salesman problem (1-PDTSP) when the number of vehicles is equal to 1. Since 1-VRPPD specializes VRP, it is NP hard in the strong sense. Iterative modified simulated annealing (IMSA) is presented along with greedy random-based initial solution algorithm. IMSA provides a good approximation to the global optimum in a large search space. Experiment is done for the instances with different number of customers and their demands. With respect to average values of IMSA execution times, proposed method is appropriate for practical applications. Copyright (C) 2008 Goran Martinovic et al.