The balanced cargo vehicle routing problem with time windows

This paper addresses a variant of the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) that targets the balancing of the load carried by each active vehicle (balanced cargo VRPTW or BCVRPTW). A new approach, based on the free disposal hull (FDH) method of data envelopment analysis, is proposed: it consists of an initial, feasible route generation procedure that employs an effective heuristic for the VRPTW, followed by an iterative method for selecting routes on the efficiency frontier, according to the criteria of the BCVRPTW and the notion of non-dominated solutions embedded within FDH. This new approach produces, according to our computational evaluation, very good results for the BCVRPTW, and can serve as the basis for solving real-life vehicle routing problems. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.