Multi-depot vessel routing problem in a direction dependent wavefield

Considerable research has been done on the vehicle routing problem and its variants; however only limited amount of existing work deals with possible environmental conditions and their effects on the vehicle routes. This paper presents the multiple-depot vehicle routing problem for surface vessels, where the vehicles must traverse a time-invariant direction-dependent medium. Our model captures environmental effects and vessel dynamics on the considered paths. Three heuristic solution methods are developed and tested on simulated scenarios. The first approach exactly solves an approximate formulation of the problem, the second approximately solves an approximate problem formulation, while the third approximately solves the exact problem. Performance of the algorithms are compared to assess the tradeoff between computational cost and quality of the found solutions.