A Decomposition Approach to Solve a General Delivery Problem

This paper presents a new distribution and route planning problem, General Delivery Problem (GDP). Such problem is more general than the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem. To solve a GDP, a three-phase framework based on decomposition techniques is introduced. The decomposition techniques are employed to divide an original problem into a set of sub-problems, which can reduce the problem size. A kind of decomposition technique, Capacity Clustering Algorithm (CCA), is embedded into the three-phase framework with Simulated Annealing (SA) to solve a special GDP. The proposed three-phase framework with the above two algorithms is compared with five other decomposition methods in a distribution instance of the Regional Fire and Emergency Center in the north of France.