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 (FA). 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. In this paper, the instances of solid waste management were created to simulate a real-life scenario of CVRP. This was formulated into a multiobjective optimization problem considering various depot positioning. Firefly Algorithm (FA) which is a metaheuristic technique was employed to navigate the travel path towards an optimal depot placement for solving the LRP model. Various depot positions which includes random, optimized, centered and eccentric were evaluated. Results showed that the optimized depot positioning approach obtained the best depot position as against the other possible positions. Results when compared with two metaheuristics approach Unified Hybrid Genetic Search (UHGS) and Iterated Local Search with Set Partitioning (ILS-SP) presented in literature also showed that, optimized depot positioning obtained the best results and FA can compete effectively with other metaheuristics approaches.