A Vehicle Routing Problem with Two Types of Ships in Container Terminals

Abstract

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of well-established and important topic in supply chain and logistics networks. The location-routing decision-making has a significant role to optimize the traveling cost per distance, total traveling time and the number of vehicles in the supply chain networks. One of the recent advances in these systems refers to container terminals in the global trade centers. The new contributions of this model are to consider the routes of two types of ships (Tramp and Liner) with different properties and the time windows in order to minimize costs, simultaneously. The proposed model is solved by an exact solver by using LINGO software and because of inherent complexity of problem proposed in the real-world cases, the Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to find an optimal/global solution in a reasonable time. Finally, an in-depth analysis and discussion is provided to conclude the main findings and practical implications of the results.