Developing a Vehicle Routing Model Considering Effective Criteria for Supporting of Military Units

Abstract

In this research, a mathematical model of the vehicle routing problem to support military units is presented and solved. To present this model, first, various criteria extracted from the literature review of vehicle routing issues in the field of military, war and crisis are investigated. Then, the criteria that are important for supporting the military units under study are introduced and the mathematical model of the problem based on these criteria is presented. One of the salient features of the current research compared to similar researches is the simultaneous consideration of five effective criteria in supporting the units of this organization, which include "time window for delivery of goods to units", "ability to pick-up and deliver goods on the road transport route", "the heterogeneity of the fleet of road vehicles", "the need to send goods from multi-depot" and "the need to transport several types of goods". Since this is one of the optimization problems in the family of NP-hard problems, GA, PSO and SA algorithms were used to solve the model. In order to validate, the results of these algorithms have been compared with the exact solution results with GAMS software, which shows the proper performance of the proposed genetic algorithm.