Depot Location Analysis for Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

A Case Study of Solid Waste Management

Abstract

This paper presents an optimized solution to locate a depot on multiobjective instances of Capacitated Vehicle Pouting Problem (CVRP) using firefly algorithm (FFA). The main objective of a depot location routing problem (LRP) is to obtain the optimal position to locate a depot in other to serve a set of customers ensuring the minimum possible total travelled distance across a search space. A case study on the solid waste management is captured to simulate a real-life scenario and used to evaluate the performance of the FFA approach. The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) was put into context in solving the simulated Instances. In addressing this decision problem, this paper employed the brightness and attraction behavior of FFA as the metaheuristic technique to navigate the travel path towards an optimal depot placement for solving the depot LRP model. Various depot positions which includes random, optimized, centered and eccentric were evaluated. Results showed that this approach obtained an optimal depot position as against the other possible positions (random, centered or eccentric) in a search space and it is very efficient in solving a depot LRP model.