Timber Transport Vehicle Routing Problems: Formulation and Heuristic Solution

We present a model formulation and a Tabu Search based solution method for the Timber Transport Vehicle Routing Problem (TTVRP). A fleet of

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trucks which are situated at the respective homes of the truck drivers has to fulfil

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transports of round timber between different wood storage locations and industrial sites. All transports are carried out as full truck loads. Since the full truck movements are predetermined our objective is to minimize the overall distance of empty truck movements. In addition to the standard VRP we have to consider weight constraints at the network, multi-depots, and time windows. The optimum solution of this problem with common solver software is only possible for very small instances. Therefore we develop a customized heuristic to solve real-life problems. We modify the traditional Tabu Search by delimiting the neighborhood in some iterations and verify our heuristic with extensive numerical studies.