Multi-depot vehicle routing problem with time windows under shared depot resources

A new variant of multi-depot vehicle routing problem with time windows is studied. In the new variant, the depot where the vehicle ends is flexible, namely, it is not entirely the same as the depot that it starts from. An integer programming model is formulated with the minimum total traveling cost under the constrains of time window, capacity and route duration of the vehicle, the fleet size and the number of parking spaces of each depot. As the problem is an NP-Hard problem, a hybrid genetic algorithm with adaptive local search is proposed to solve it. Finally, the computational results show that the proposed method is competitive in terms of solution quality. Compared with the classic MDVRPTW, allowing flexible choice of the stop depot can further reduce total traveling cost.