The thesis addresses the multi-vehicle cargo redistribution problem, in which vehicle routes must be planned in order to redistribute cargo between locations as efficiently as possible while respecting vehicle and network constraints. The problem belongs to the class of challenging combinatorial optimization problems and can be viewed as a variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), an important area of logistics optimization. The thesis first introduces the basic concepts of optimization problems, their computational complexity, and common solution approaches. This is followed by a formal description of the multi-vehicle cargo redistribution problem and its formulation as an integer linear programming model. The main part of the thesis is devoted to the development and description of several heuristic algorithms that I have developed for solving the problem. The presented approaches include greedy algorithms, node-repair-based methods, and the ruin-and-recreate metaheuristic. To evaluate their performance, a set of test instances with different sizes and spatial distributions of nodes was generated. The final part of the thesis presents the testing methodology and a comparison of the proposed algorithms.
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