Integration of Forward and Reverse Logistics at the Vehicle Routing Level

For the sake of research, big household appliance retailer's vehicle routing planning for products' distribution and returned products' collection is defined as the tracer for which a general model is established under specified conditions. The model depicts the retailer's distribution center's vehicle routing process, in which geographically dispersed stores receive the preordered products from and simultaneously send the returned products to the distribution center with penalty constraint for backhaul delay. Based on Max-Min Ant System, a new heuristics for solving the problem above-mentioned is presented. Through computational experiment, the performance of this algorithm is proved to be excellent.