Towards solving heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing problem with time windows and additional constraints: Real use case study

In advanced logistic systems, there is a need for a comprehensive optimization of the transport of goods, which would reduce costs. During past decades, several theoretical and practical approaches to solve vehicle routing problems (VRP) were proposed. The problem of optimal fleet management is often transformed to discrete optimization problem that relies on determining the most economical transport routes for a number of vehicles in order to deliver (or pick up) certain amount of goods to geographically distributed set of customers. However, real life problems generally differ from the classical cases because they impose additional constraints to be satisfied. Therefore, research related to developing dedicated theoretical and technological solutions fitted to particular real life use case are very important. In the paper, the particular variant of the VRP problem which is an exemplification of the real-life business case is presented. Authors of the paper proposed an architecture of modular system and an algorithm designed to solve the real-world variant of the VRP which is important from the business perspective.