Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem under Quality Constraint for Perishable Product

An approach for minimizing both truck routing distance and perishable product defect is presented in this paper. The proposed algorithm was constructed based on a memetic algorithm associated with a simple genetic algorithm and a powerful local search. The routing problem was modeled as a capacitated vehicle routing problem under a quality constraint for delivering perishable product. The quality degradation function was incorporated into the problem by assigning a critical routing time as a constraint. A penalty was given to the vehicle route overlapping the critical time in order to minimize the product defect due to quality degradation during the delivery process. The simulation revealed that the proposed approach was capable of solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem with minimum travel distance and product defect. The presented method could further be applied for optimizing the delivery of products whose quality degradation is an important factor to be accounted in the route planning.