Publication

Abstract : Fast Moving Consumer Goods [FMCG] are the goods that are sold quickly and are low in cost. The companies dealing with the delivery services of FMCG need to deliver the goods keeping in mind logistics costs and customer satisfaction (pertaining to on-time delivery). They have to even deal with additional constraints such as time slots where the goods are delivered to the customers within the prescribed time slots by the company. Thus vehicle scheduling needs to be done in an efficient manner. When more than one delivery vehicle is used for the problem set, the problem becomes non-polynomial. These problems are called Vehicle Routing Problems with Time Slots (VRPTS). A simple explanation of Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is that the delivery trucks have to cover a geographically dispersed customer set using optimal routes while satisfying constraints such as vehicle capacity and the customer demands. Vehicle routing problem is used to cover a set of customers, by finding a set of routes, starting and ending at a depot that together covers a set of customers. There are many algorithms to solve a VRP each having their own advantages and limitations. Most of the algorithms are heuristics. Heuristic methods are quick and provide the user with near optimal solutions and optimization that give a solution which is not guaranteed to be optimal. Solving a VRP to be exact optimal is too exhaustive, hence the algorithms used for VRP are heuristics and they give us a solution that is near optimal in a quick time.