Checking the feasibility of a vehicle route in integrated supply chain transportation model

The paper presents the variant of vehicle routing problem that considers the optimal integration of forward flow of materials from manufacturer to customers with a backward flow of materials from customers to specialised warehouses or recycling sites. The problem is called vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery (VRPSPD). In VRPSPD, a customer requires a given shipment to be delivered as well as a given load to be picked up simultaneously. Complete service (i.e., delivery and pickup) to the customer is provided by a vehicle in a single visit and thus the load of a vehicle fluctuates over the route. Given that the load fluctuates over the route, an important issue of VRPSPD is checking the feasibility of a route during local search. In this paper, we present the cumulative net-pickup approach for checking the feasibility of a vehicle route while performing neighbourhood search in local search schemes.