The Two-Commodity Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Synchronization

We introduce the two-commodity capacitated vehicle routing problem with synchronization (2- CVRP-S). In the 2-CVRP-S customers must be supplied with two different commodities. Each commodity requires the assignment of a certain type of vehicle. A schedule synchronization constraint couples the two resulting vehicle routing problems for the two commodities. This constraint ensures that the two delivery operations starting times at a customer site do not differ by more than a given time span. We propose a mixed integer linear optimization program for the 2-CVRP-S. A standard solver is applied to several instances in order to get initial insights into the impacts of the synchronization requirements among the two fleets.