THE VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM WITH D-RELAXED PRIORITY RULE

In the classic Vehicle Routing Problem, the order in which vertices are visited has no restrictions. In some real situations this condition may not be enough to represent the problem, as there are cases in which the order of visit to the vertices becomes extremely important. Examples of situations in which this priority problem arises include humanitarian aid operations; control of natural disasters and provision of services. To deal with these situations, we defined the Clustered Vehicle Routing Problem with d-Relaxed Priority Rule (CluVRP-d), which consists of an extension of the literature to a version where all vertices must be visited exactly once and vehicles have capacity limitations. A new mathematical formulation is proposed, and a heuristic approach is presented to deal with larger instances. Computational results, based on data from the literature, are presented to demonstrate the quality of the proposed approaches.