A New Multi-objective Competitive Open Vehicle Routing Problem Solved by Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper presents a new variant of an open vehicle routing problem (OVRP), in which competition exists between distributors. In the OVRP with competitive time windows (OVRPCTW), the reaching time to customers affects the sales amount. Therefore, distributors intend to service customers earlier than rivals, to obtain the maximum sales. Moreover, a part of a driver’s benefit is related to the amount of sales; thus, the balance of goods carried in each vehicle is important in view of the limited vehicle capacities. In this paper, a new, multi-objective mathematical model of the homogeneous and competitive OVRP is presented, to minimize the travel cost of routes and to maximize the obtained sales while concurrently balancing the goods distributed among vehicles. This model is solved by the use of a multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm, and the related results are compared with the results of NSGA-II, which is a well-known multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. A comparison of our results with three performance metrics confirms that the proposed MOPSO is an efficient algorithm for solving the competitive OVRP with a reasonable computational time and cost. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012