Model and Heuristics for the Heterogeneous Fixed Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem with Pick-Up and Delivery

Purpose – This paper discusses the heterogeneous fixed fleet ve-hicle routing problem with pick-up and delivery (HFFVRPPD), for vehicles with different capacities, fixed costs, and travel costs. Research Design, data, methodology – This paper made nine as-sumptions for establishing a mathematical model to describe HFFVRPPD. It established a practical mathematical model, and because of the non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard), improved the traditional simulated annealing algorithm and tested a new algorithm using a certain scale model. Result – We calculated the minimum cost of the heterogeneous fixed fleet vehicle routing problem (HFFVRP) with a single task and, on comparing the results with the actual HFFVRP for the single task alone, observed that the total cost of HFFVRPPD reduced sig-nificantly by 46.7%. The results showed that the new algorithm pro-vides better solutions and stability. Conclusions – This paper, by comparing the HFFVRP and HFFVRPPD results, highlights certain advantages of using HFFVRPPD in physical distribution enterprises, such as saving dis-tribution vehicles, reducing logistics cost, and raising economic benefits.