In this study, the capacitated vehicle routing problem with shift based time constraints is taken into consideration. The study stemmed from an application in a cross dock. The considered cross dock is assumed to feed directly the production lines of its customer. The customer has a just-in-time production system that requires producing only in necessary quantities at the necessary times. This necessitates the arrival of the parts/products collected from different suppliers at the customer at the beginning of each shift of production. The shift times constitute deadlines for the products to be collected from the suppliers and used in each shift. The collection problem then can be seen as the capacitated vehicle routing problem with shift based time constraints. The objective of the collection problem is to minimize the routing costs. For the accomplishment of this objective it is required to decide on products of which shift(s) should be taken from a supplier when a vehicle arrives at that supplier. For the solution of the problem a mathematical model is formulated. Since the dealt problem is NP-Hard, meta-heuristic solution approaches based on variable neighborhood search and simulated annealing are proposed. Computational experimentation is conducted on the test problems which are tailored from the capacitated vehicle routing instances from the literature.

This thesis deals particular with the particularities of the maritime claims arising of the construction, repair or equipment of any ship or dock charges and dues and the particularities of the arrest of ship for these maritime claims in the Republic of Lithuania.