A Multiple Vehicles Routing Problem Algorithm with Stochastic Demand

A heuristic algorithm for multiple vehicles routing problem with stochastic demand is proposed and the goal is to minimize the total traveling cost. Two-phase method is adopted to deal with this problem. In the first phase, an algorithm is proposed to partition customers into clusters, and the main task of the second phase is to design an effective routing through each cluster of customers to minimize the total expected traveling cost. Both the a priori strategy and the reoptimization strategy are used to obtain the optimal routing. The experiment results indicate that this method can produce solutions of good quality and is an effective algorithm for the multiple vehicles routing problem with stochastic demand