A 2-STAGE HEURISTIC APPROACH FOR THE NEWSPAPER DELIVERY PROBLEM

In this article we study newspaper delivery problems arising in a majo r press company in Korea. Newspapers are to be delivered to the local distribution centers in time from several main distribution centers. T he problem is a very complicated one which combines set partitioning, multi-vehicle routing with time window, and scheduling problems. We di vide the whole problem into two stages and develop a seemingly efficie nt heuristic method combined with simulated annealing algorithm. A num erical example is given to demonstrate our method. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.