Distributing Fibre Boards: A Practical Application of the Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Three-dimensional Loading Constraints.

The Heterogeneous Fleet Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Three- Dimensional Loading Constraints (3L-HFCVRPTW) combines the aspects of 3D loading, heterogeneous transport with capacity constraints and time windows for deliveries. It is the first formulation that comprises all these aspects and takes its inspiration from a practical problem of distributing daily fibre board deliveries faced by our industry partner. Given the shape of the goods to transport, the delivery vehicles are customised and their loading constraints take a specialised form. This study introduces the problem and its constraints as well as a specialised procedure for loading the boards. The loading module can be called during or after the route optimisation. In this initial work, we apply simple local search procedures to the routing problem to two data sets obtained from our industry partner and subsequently employ the loading module to place the deliveries on the vehicles. Simulated Annealing outperforms Iterated Local Search, suggesting that the routing problem is multimodal, and operators that shift deliveries between routes appear most beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]