A solution approach from an analytic model to heuristic algorithm for special case of vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands (Q1023176)

Summary: We define a special case for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands (SC-VRPSD) where customer demands are normally distributed. We propose a new linear model for computing the expected length of a tour in SC-VRPSD. The proposed model is based on the integration of the ``Traveling Salesman Problem'' (TSP) and the Assignment Problem. For large-scale problems, we also use an Iterated Local Search (ILS) algorithm in order to reach an effective solution.