Pickup and Delivery by Multiple Vehicles from Multiple Depots

In this lesson, you will learn how to:

The problem of pickup and delivery by multiple vehicles from multiple depots is known as the Multiple-Depot Pickup and Delivery Problem (MDPDP). For many distribution companies in the real world, customers are widely geographically separated, making pickup or delivery from a single depot too costly. A possible solution is to open anything from a few to many depots as "home bases" for vehicles. This problem shows you how to model and solve a problem where there is more than one vehicle depot. In this problem each visit must be assigned to a particular truck. Each truck is itself assigned to a particular depot. The aim is still to minimize the global cost of the routes serving all the visits. Moreover, since MDPDP problems are usually large, this problem aims to increase performance by decomposing the problem into smaller subproblems, bringing them all together for a complete solution.