A Novel Two-Phase Approach to Solve Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem

In today’s galloping world, most purchases have been ordered online, so studying Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) can help companies to maximize their profit. In this paper, Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem (MDVRP) is considered as a new type of VRP, where the customers are served from several depots aiming to minimize the total transportation cost. NP-hardness of MDVRP causes in impossibility to solve the problem with exact methods; while, heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches have their own pros and cons. We propose a new approach, where customers are first assign to depots and then allocated to vehicles in each depot. Then, we solve the defined sub-problems using the exact methods. Computational experiments on benchmark instances are conducted to examine the performance of the new approach. The results suggest that the proposed algorithm is able to solve the MDVRP in low computational time and reasonable cost.