A general heuristic for vehicle routing problems

We present a unified heuristic, which is able to solve five different variants of the vehicle routing problem: the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), the multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP), the site dependent vehicle routing problem (SDVRP) and the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP). All problem variants are transformed to a rich pickup and delivery model and solved using the Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) framework presented in Ropke and Pisinger (2004). The ALNS framework is an extension of the Large Neighborhood Search framework by Shaw (1998) with an adaptive layer. This layer adaptively chooses among a number of insertion and removal heuristics, to intensify and diversify the search. The presented approach has a number of advantages: ALNS provides solutions of very high quality, the algorithm is robust, and to some extent self-calibrating. Moreover, the unified model allows the dispatcher to m...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: COR
• Authors: David Pisinger, Stefan Ropke
• Keywords: COR 2007, COR 2008, Large Neighborhood Search, Routing, Vehicle