A Multi-Trip Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows for Pharmaceutical Distribution

This study addresses the multi-trip vehicle routing problem with time windows in the pharmaceutical distribution domain. The objective is to minimize the number of vehicles used to delivery pharmaceutical goods to customers satisfying hard time windows constraints. We propose a two-phase decomposition metaheuristic that combines two iterated local search (ILS) procedures. The metaheuristic is compared with a greedy heuristic and a mathematical model that is effective in terms of solution quality and computing time.