PRODUCTION ROUTING PROBLEM WITH HETEROGENEOUS FLEET: AN ANALYSIS OF TWO PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION APROACHES

We address the production routing problem in a single-plant, single-product environment, under the Maximum Level inventory policy, and with a heterogeneous fleet over a finite planning horizon. We propose two solution approaches: the first one is a particle swarm optimization algorithm; and the second is a hybrid approach that combines particle swarm optimization with a constructive heuristic for generating solutions to the vehicle routing problem. We tested these methodologies on instances from the literature, finding that the hybrid approach provides higher quality solutions.