A vehicle routing model with split delivery and stop nodes

In this work, a new variant of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is presented where the vehicles cannot perform any route leg longer than a given length L (although the routes can be longer). Thus, once a route leg length is close to L, the vehicle must go to a stop node to end the leg or return to the depot. We introduce this condition in a variation of the CVRP, the Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem, where multiple visits to a customer by different vehicles are allowed. We present two formulations for this problem which we call Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem with Stop Nodes: a vehicle flow formulation and a commodity flow formulation. Because of the complexity of this problem, a heuristic approach is developed. We compare its performance with and without the stop node