A heuristics for the vehicle routing problem in a package reuse system using the column generation method

This paper aims to propose the heuristics for a vehicle routing problem in a package reuse system. Recently, from the viewpoint of environmental protection, many manufacturers construct reuse and/or recycling systems for disposed products. With the operations of reuse and/or recycling systems, effective systems for reverse logistics where disposed products are collected from customers are needed. In this paper, a vehicle routing problem for a package reuse system is considered, where disposed packages are transported by filling the empty capacities of many vehicles traveling to pick-up destinations or returning to their points of origin. We formulate a vehicle routing model for a mathematical programming problem, which maximizes the total transportation quantity of disposed packages, propose a heuristics using the column generation method for solving a Lagrangian dual, and clarify the effectiveness of the proposed heuristics using some numerical examples.