Minimising vehicle distribution duration considering service priority

A vehicle routing problem (VRP) is dealt with, where a fleet of vehicles serve (distribution/pickup) a given subset of demand locations in an urban network. A service time priority degree is given to a subset of demand locations. The aim of this paper is to find the least possible overall service time for vehicles to all the demand locations and particularly those that have a high degree of priority. The problem is dealt with in the context of graph theory and a corresponding method is proposed. The paper incorporates a numerical example of the proposed method.