A BBO algorithm for multi-trip heterogeneous vehicle routing problem of perishable products with intermediate depots and time windows

Distribution of products within the supply chain with the highest quality is one of the most important competitive activities in industries with perishable products. Companies should pay much attention to the distribution during design of their optimal supply chain. In this paper, a vehicle routing problem with multi-trip heterogeneous vehicles is formulated that considers available intermediate depots and soft time windows. A mixed integer linear programming model is presented to minimize total traveled distance, vehicles usage costs, earliness and tardiness penalty costs of services, and determine optimal routes for vehicles. To solve the problem, a biography based optimization algorithm (BBO) is proposed to deal with the complexity of problem. In addition, a number of random instances in different sizes (small, medium, and large) are generated and solved by CPLEX solver of GAMS to evaluate the efficiency of algorithm and prove the model validation. Finally, The results show that the proposed solution algorithm has appropriate performance in a reasonable run time.