Solving the Heterogeneous Fixed Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem by a Column Generation

The heterogeneous fixed fleet vehicle routing problem (HFFVRP) is one of the most significant extension problems of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). The HFFOVRP is the problem of designing optimal delivery from a given depot in order to satisfy the demand of the customer population by a fleet of a fixed number of vehicles. Because the solving of this problem which has numerous applications in industrial and service problems is difficult، a column generation (CG) algorithm for solving HFFVRP is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm is tested on 16 standard instances involving 10 to 50 customers. The computational results show that the CG results are better than results of exact algorithm for solving the HFFVRP within a comparatively shorter period of time.