Two composite methods for soft drink distribution problem

Abstract

In this paper, we propose two methods for solving a real-life soft drink distribution problem. The objective of this problem is to minimize the total number of vehicles used. The proposed methods are composite procedures involving the solution of bin packing problems, and the application of an assignment-based procedure or a generalized crossing procedure, respectively for improvement. We apply the proposed composite procedures to a number of real-life problem instances. The computational results show that our methods are able to obtain better solutions than the methods proposed in the literature. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.