Vehicle routing using fixed delivery areas

In this paper we consider the problem of vehicle routing using fixed delivery areas. This is the problem of splitting the area serviced by a depot into a number of separate subareas—a single delivery vehicle being assigned to each subarea to supply all the customers within the subarea. A heuristic algorithm is developed for the problem based upon an initial allocation of customers to subareas followed by customer interchanges in an attempt to improve the subareas. Computational results are presented for a number of test problems drawn from the literature.