ABSTRACT
In the fi eld of transportation, the design of the delivery process, if well scheduled, is beneficial in various contexts as supply chain management and logistics. The delivery process consists in distributing orders from suppliers to some geographically dispersed demand points. The main concern in a distribution network is to specify the most cost-effective itinerary for delivering goods and commodities from a set of warehouses to customers. Such a process can be viewed as a vehicle routing problem (VRP), one of the widely studied combinatorial optimization problems, due to its relevance in modeling real-world applications.
