Solving the Open Vehicle Routing Problem with Fuzzy Restrictions on Time Windows

Abstract

Nowadays, with the urbanization and globalization of trade, companies are facing fundamental challenges,This is why companies seek to stabilize and increase their market share while minimizing costs and maximizing profits. distribution problem as a structure constructed by the participants, represents the most important part of logistic expenses. Vehicle routing problem has been a growing interest as a distribution problem, it concerns to create the routes of a set of vehicles in order to deliver a list of customers, In the goal to minimize the cost of delivering goods. Open vehicle routing problem (OVRP) is an extension of vehicle routing problem where Each route could be a Hamiltonian path over the route's subset of customers. In this paper we provide an extension of the open vehicle routing problem, called Open vehicle routing problem with fuzzy time windows, we adopt a mathematical model for this type of problem, and by using alpha cut method through a decomposition of this original problem in their original fuzzy form into a set of crisp models (OVRPFTW) we propose a solution of this problem. Computational results indicate that this model can fulfill a significant cost-saving while securing a high level of service.