Ali Kourank Beheshti , Seyed Reza Hejazi,
Volume 25, Issue 4 (IJIEPR 2014)
Abstract
Customer service level is of prime importance in today competitive world and has various dimensions with delivery quality being one of the most important ones. Delivery quality has several parameters such as deliver time window options, time window size, etc. In this paper we focus on one of these parameters, namely time window setting. It has a direct impact upon customer satisfaction and business profit. On the other hand, delivery time windows affect routing and distribution costs. Generally, in the routing operation, time windows have been determined by customers or distributer and are considered as input parameters for the vehicle routing problem with time window (VRPTW) model. In this paper, a mathematical model is proposed for the integration of these two decisions in other words, in the present model, time window setting decisions are integrated with routing decisions. Then a column generation approach is employed to obtain the lower bounds of problems and to solve the problems, a quantum algorithm is proposed. Finally, the computational results of some instances are reported and the results of these approaches are compared. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the quantum algorithm in solving this problem.
Morteza Rasti-Barzoki, Ali Kourank Beheshti, Seyed Reza Hejazi,
Volume 27, Issue 2 (IJIEPR 2016)
Abstract
This paper addresses a production and outbound distribution scheduling problem in which a set of jobs have to be process on a single machine for delivery to customers or to other machines for further processing. We assume that there is a sufficient number of vehicles and the delivery costs is independent of batch size but it is dependent on each trip. In this paper, we present an Artificial Immune System (AIS) for this problem. The objective is to minimize the sum of the total weighted number of tardy jobs and the batch delivery costs. A batch setup time has to be added before processing the first job in each batch. Using computational test, we compare our method with an existing method for the mentioned problem in literature namely Simulated Annealing (SA). Computational tests show the significant improvement of AIS over the SA.
