An Efficient Fuzzy Programming Approach for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Soft Time Windows
Sezgin Kilic and Sezgin Kaplan
This paper considers the vehicle routing problem with soft time windows (VRPSTW) where the customers’ preferences and tolerances on the latest delivery times are handled by use of a fuzzy programming model.The proposed model and the solution approach make easy to trade-off distributors’ various strategies between efficiency and responsiveness spectrum. An indirect enumeration strategy is proposed to generate all pseudo-dominant (Pareto) solutions to the VRPSTW. A simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is implemented to solve the test problems. The importance and advantages of the proposed approach are illustrated by numerical results.
Keywords: Vehicle routing problem, soft time windows, fuzzy sets, simulated annealing, fuzzy programming.