Optimizing the routing problem in the vehicle carrying cash considering the route risk (case study of Bank Shahr)

The process of transferring money from the treasury to the branches and returning it at specific and limited periods is one of the applications of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). Many parameters affect it, but choosing the right route is the key parameter so that the money delivery process is carried out in a specific period with the least risk. In the present paper, new relationships are defined in the form of three concepts in order to minimize route risk. These concepts are: 1) the vehicle does not travel long routes in the first three movements, 2) a branch is not served at the same hours on two consecutive days, and 3) an arc should not be repeated on two consecutive days. The proposed model with real information received from Bank Shahr has been performed for all branches in Tehran. Because the  VRP is an NP-Hard problem, a genetic algorithm was used to solve the problem. Different issues in various production dimensions were solved with GAMS and MATLAB software to show the algorithm solution quality. The results show that the difference between the genetic algorithm and the optimal solution is an average of 1.09% and a maximum of 1.75%.