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In this paper, we propose a fast and scalable, yet effective, metaheuristic called FILO to solve large-scale instances of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem. Our approach consists of a main iterative part, based on the Iterated Local Search paradigm, which employs a carefully designed combination of existing acceleration techniques, as well as novel strategies to keep the optimization localized, controlled, and tailored to the current instance and solution. A Simulated Annealing-based neighbor acceptance criterion is used to obtain a continuous diversification, to ensure the exploration of different regions of the search space. Results on extensively studied benchmark instances from the literature, supported by a thorough analysis of the algorithm's main components, show the effectiveness of the proposed design choices, making FILO highly competitive with existing state-of-the-art algorithms, both in terms of computing time and solution quality. Finally, guidelines for possible efficient implementations, algorithm source code, and a library of reusable components are open-sourced to allow reproduction of our results and promote further investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a general solution approach for a broad class of vehicle routing problems that all use a single vehicle, composed of a truck and a detachable trailer, to serve a set of customers with known demand and accessibility constraints. A more general problem, called the extended single truck and trailer routing problem (XSTTRP), is used as a common baseline to describe and model this class of problems. In particular, the XSTTRP contains, all together, a variety of vertex types previously considered only separately: truck customers, vehicle customers with and without parking facilities, and parking-only locations. To solve the XSTTRP, we developed a fast and effective hybrid metaheuristic, consisting of an iterative core part, in which routes that define high-quality solutions are stored in a pool. Eventually, a set-partitioning-based postoptimization selects the best combination of routes that forms a feasible solution from the pool. The algorithm is tested on extensively studied problems from the literature, such as the multiple depot vehicle routing problem, the location routing problem, the single truck and trailer routing problem with satellite depots, and the single truck and trailer routing problem. Finally, computational results and a thorough analysis of the main algorithm's components on newly designed XSTTRP instances are provided. The obtained results show that the proposed hybrid metaheuristic is highly competitive with previous approaches designed to solve specific specialized problems, both in terms of computing time and solution quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose local search algorithms for the vehicle routing problem with soft time-window constraints. The time-window constraint for each customer is treated as a penalty function, which is very general in the sense that it can be nonconvex and discontinuous as long as it is piecewise linear. In our algorithm, we use local search to assign customers to vehicles and to find orders of customers for vehicles to visit. Our algorithm employs an advanced neighborhood, called the cyclic-exchange neighborhood,in addition to standard neighborhoods for the vehicle routing problem. After fixing the order of customers for a vehicle to visit, we must determine the optimal start times of processing at customers so that the total penalty is minimized. We show that this problem can be efficiently solved by using dynamic programming, which is then incorporated in our algorithm. We report computational results for various benchmark instances of the vehicle routing problem. The generality of time-window constraints allows us to handle a wide variety of scheduling problems. As an example, we mention in this paper an application to a production scheduling problem with inventory cost, and report computational results for real-world instances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys the research on the metaheuristics for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW).The VRPTW can be described as the problem of designing least cost routes from one depot to a set of geographically scattered points. The routes must be designed in such a way that each point is visited only once by exactly one vehicle within a given time interval; all routes start and end at the depot, and the total demands of all points on one particular route must not exceed the capacity of the vehicle. Metaheuristics are general solution procedures that explore the solution space to identify good solutions and often embed some of the standard route construction and improvement heuristics described in the first part of this article. In addition to describing basic features of each method, experimental results for Solomon's benchmark test problems are presented and analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consistent vehicle routing problem (ConVRP) takes customer satisfaction into account by assigning one driver to a customer and by bounding the variation in the arrival times over a given planning horizon. These requirements may be too restrictive in some applications. In the generalized ConVRP (GenConVRP), each customer is visited by a limited number of drivers and the variation in the arrival times is penalized in the objective function. The vehicle departure times may be adjusted to obtain stable arrival times. Additionally, customers are associated with AM/PM time windows. In contrast to previous work on the ConVRP, we do not use the template concept to generate routing plans. Our approach is based on a flexible large neighborhood search that is applied to the entire solution. Several destroy and repair heuristics have been designed to remove customers from the routes and to reinsert them at better positions. Arrival time consistency is improved by a simple 2-opt operator that reverses parts of particular routes. A computational study is performed on ConVRP benchmark instances and on new instances generated for the generalized problem. The proposed algorithm performs well on different variants of the ConVRP. It outperforms template-based approaches in terms of travel cost and time consistency. For the GenConVRP, we experiment with different input parameters and examine the trade-off between travel cost and customer satisfaction. Remarkable cost savings can be obtained by allowing more than one driver per customer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) was introduced 50 years ago by Dantzig and Ramser under the title "The Truck Dispatching Problem." The study of the VRP has given rise to major developments in the fields of exact algorithms and heuristics. In particular, highly sophisticated exact mathematical programming decomposition algorithms and powerful metaheuristics for the VRP have been put forward in recent years. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief account of this development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]