A general variable neighborhood search for the one-commodity pickup-and-delivery travelling salesman problem

We present a variable neighborhood search approach for solving the one-commodity pickup-and-delivery travelling salesman problem. It is characterized by a set of customers such that each of the customers either supplies (pickup customers) or demands (delivery customers) a given amount of a single product, and by a vehicle, whose given capacity must not be exceeded, that starts at the depot and must visit each customer only once. The objective is to minimize the total length of the tour. Thus, the considered problem includes checking the existence of a feasible travelling salesman’s tour and designing the optimal travelling salesman’s tour, which are both NP-hard problems. We adapt a collection of neighborhood structures, k-opt, double-bridge and insertion operators mainly used for solving the classical travelling salesman problem. A binary indexed tree data structure is used, which enables efficient feasibility checking and updating of solutions in these neighborhoods. Our extensive computational analysis shows that the proposed variable neighborhood search based heuristics outperforms the best-known algorithms in terms of both the solution quality and computational efforts. Moreover, we improve the best-known solutions of all benchmark instances from the literature (with 200 to 500 customers). We are also able to solve instances with up to 1000 customers.     

An adaptive memory methodology for the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pick-ups and deliveries

This paper deals with a routing problem variant which considers customers to simultaneously require delivery and pick-up services. The examined problem is referred to as the Vehicle Routing Problem with Simultaneous Pick-ups and Deliveries (VRPSPD). VRPSPD is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, practical large-scale instances of which cannot be solved by exact solution methodologies within acceptable computational times. Our interest was therefore focused on metaheuristic solution approaches. In specific, we introduce an Adaptive Memory (AM) algorithmic framework which collects and combines promising solution features to generate high-quality solutions. The proposed strategy employs an innovative memory mechanism to systematically maximize the amount of routing information extracted from the AM, in order to drive the search towards diverse regions of the solution space. Our metaheuristic development was tested on numerous VRPSPD instances involving from 50 to 400 customers. It proved to be rather effective and efficient, as it produced high-quality solutions, requiring limited computational effort. Furthermore, it managed to produce several new best solutions.     

An adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic for the Pollution-Routing Problem

The Pollution-Routing Problem (PRP) is a recently introduced extension of the classical Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows which consists of routing a number of vehicles to serve a set of customers, and determining their speed on each route segment so as to minimize a function comprising fuel, emission and driver costs. This paper presents an adaptive large neighborhood search for the PRP. Results of extensive computational experimentation confirm the efficiency of the algorithm.     

A heuristic algorithm for the symmetric and asymmetric vehicle routing problems with backhauls

We consider an extension of the capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), known as the Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls (VRPB), in which the set of customers is partitioned into two subsets: Linehaul and Backhaul customers. Each Linehaul customer requires the delivery of a given quantity of product from the depot, whereas a given quantity of product must be picked up from each Backhaul customer and transported to the depot. VRPB is known to be NP-hard in the strong sense, and many heuristic algorithms were proposed for the approximate solution of the problem with symmetric or Euclidean cost matrices. We present a cluster-first-route-second heuristic which uses a new clustering method and may also be used to solve problems with asymmetric cost matrix. The approach exploits the information of the normally infeasible VRPB solutions associated with a lower bound. The bound used is a Lagrangian relaxation previously proposed by the authors. The final set of feasible routes is built through a modified Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) heuristic, and inter-route and intra-route arc exchanges. Extensive computational tests on symmetric and asymmetric instances from the literature show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

A unified heuristic for a large class of Vehicle Routing Problems with Backhauls

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls is a generalization of the ordinary capacitated vehicle routing problem where goods are delivered from the depot to the linehaul customers, and additional goods are brought back to the depot from the backhaul customers. Numerous ways of modeling the backhaul constraints have been proposed in the literature, each imposing different restrictions on the handling of backhaul customers. A survey of these models is presented, and a unified model is developed that is capable of handling most variants of the problem from the literature. The unified model can be seen as a Rich Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows, which can be solved through an improved version of the large neighborhood search heuristic proposed by Ropke and Pisinger [An adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic for the pickup and delivery problem with time windows, Technical Report, DIKU, University of Copenhagen, 2004]. The results obtained in this way are comparable to or improve on similar results found by state of the art heuristics for the various variants of the problem. The heuristic has been tested on 338 problems from the literature and it has improved the best known solution for 227 of these. An additional benefit of the unified modeling and solution method is that it allows the dispatcher to mix various variants of the Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls for the individual customers or vehicles.     

Metaheuristics for the team orienteering problem

The Team Orienteering Problem (TOP) is the generalization to the case of multiple tours of the Orienteering Problem, known also as Selective Traveling Salesman Problem. A set of potential customers is available and a profit is collected from the visit to each customer. A fleet of vehicles is available to visit the customers, within a given time limit. The profit of a customer can be collected by one vehicle at most. The objective is to identify the customers which maximize the total collected profit while satisfying the given time limit for each vehicle. We propose two variants of a generalized tabu search algorithm and a variable neighborhood search algorithm for the solution of the TOP and show that each of these algorithms beats the already known heuristics. Computational experiments are made on standard instances.     

New neighborhood structures for the Double Traveling Salesman Problem with Multiple Stacks

The changing requirements in transportation and logistics have recently induced the appearance of new vehicle routing problems that include complex constraints as precedence or loading constraints. One of these problems that have appeared during the last few years is the Double Traveling Salesman Problem with Multiple Stacks (DTSPMS), a vehicle routing problem in which some pickups and deliveries must be performed in two independent networks, verifying some precedence and loading constraints imposed on the vehicle. In this paper, four new neighborhood structures for the DTSPMS based on reinsertion and permutation of orders to modify both the routes and the loading planning of the solutions are introduced and described in detail. They can be used in combination with any metaheuristic using local search as a subprocedure, guiding the search to unexplored zones of the solution space. Some computational results obtained using all proposed neighborhood structures are presented, providing good quality solutions for real sized instances.      

Branch-and-cut algorithms for the split delivery vehicle routing problem

In this paper we present two exact branch-and-cut algorithms for the Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem (SDVRP) based on two relaxed formulations that provide lower bounds to the optimum. Procedures to obtain feasible solutions to the SDVRP from a feasible solution to the relaxed formulations are presented. Computational results are presented for 4 classes of benchmark instances. The new approach is able to prove the optimality of 17 new instances. In particular, the branch-and-cut algorithm based on the first relaxed formulation is able to solve most of the instances with up to 50 customers and two instances with 75 and 100 customers.     

The bi-objective Pollution-Routing Problem

The bi-objective Pollution-Routing Problem is an extension of the Pollution-Routing Problem (PRP) which consists of routing a number of vehicles to serve a set of customers, and determining their speed on each route segment. The two objective functions pertaining to minimization of fuel consumption and driving time are conflicting and are thus considered separately. This paper presents an adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm (ALNS), combined with a speed optimization procedure, to solve the bi-objective PRP. Using the ALNS as the search engine, four a posteriori methods, namely the weighting method, the weighting method with normalization, the epsilon-constraint method and a new hybrid method (HM), are tested using a scalarization of the two objective functions. The HM combines adaptive weighting with the epsilon-constraint method. To evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm, new sets of instances based on real geographic data are generated, and a library of bi-criteria PRP instances is compiled. Results of extensive computational experiments with the four methods are presented and compared with one another by means of the hypervolume and epsilon indicators. The results show that HM is highly effective in finding good-quality non-dominated solutions on PRP instances with 100 nodes.     

A GRASP + ILP-based metaheuristic for the capacitated location-routing problem

In this paper we present a three-phase heuristic for the Capacitated Location-Routing Problem. In the first stage, we apply a GRASP followed by local search procedures to construct a bundle of solutions. In the second stage, an integer-linear program (ILP) is solved taking as input the different routes belonging to the solutions of the bundle, with the objective of constructing a new solution as a combination of these routes. In the third and final stage, the same ILP is iteratively solved by column generation to improve the solutions found during the first two stages. The last two stages are based on a new model, the location-reallocation model, which generalizes the capacitated facility location problem and the reallocation model by simultaneously locating facilities and reallocating customers to routes assigned to these facilities. Extensive computational experiments show that our method is competitive with the other heuristics found in the literature, yielding the tightest average gaps on several sets of instances and being able to improve the best known feasible solutions for some of them.     

A heuristic algorithm for the asymmetric capacitated vehicle routing problem

We consider the Asymmetric Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (ACVRP[, a particular case of the standard asymmetric Vehicle Routing Problem arising when only the vehicle capacity constraints are imposed. ACVRP is known to be NP-hard and finds practical applications, e.g. in distribution and scheduling. In this paper we describe the extension to ACVRP of the two well-known Clarke-Wright and Fisher-Jaikumar heuristic algorithms. We also propose a new heuristic algorithm for ACVRP that, starting with an initial infeasible solution, determines the final set of vehicle routes through an insertion procedure as well as intea-route and inter-route arc exchanges. The initial infeasible solution is obtained by using the additive bounding procedures for ACVRP described by Fischetti, Toth and Vigo in 1992. Extensive computational results on several classes of randomly generated test problems involving up to 300 customers and on some real instances of distribution problems in urban areas, are presented. The results obtained show that the proposed approach favourably compares with previous algorithms from the literature.     

A branch-and-cut-and-price algorithm for the cumulative capacitated vehicle routing problem

In this paper we consider the Cumulative Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CCVRP), which is a variation of the well-known Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). In this problem, the traditional objective of minimizing total distance or time traveled by the vehicles is replaced by minimizing the sum of arrival times at the customers. We propose a branch-and-cut-and-price algorithm for obtaining optimal solutions to the problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first published exact algorithm for the CCVRP. We present computational results based on a set of standard CVRP benchmarks and investigate the effect of modifying the number of vehicles available.     

An iterated local search algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with backhauls

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls (VRPB) is an extension of the VRP that deals with two types of customers: the consumers (linehaul) that request goods from the depot and the suppliers (backhaul) that send goods to the depot. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective iterated local search algorithm for the VRPB. Its main component is an oscillating local search heuristic that has two main features. First, it explores a broad neighborhood structure at each iteration. This is efficiently done using a data structure that stores information about the set of neighboring solutions. Second, the heuristic performs constant transitions between feasible and infeasible portions of the solution space. These transitions are regulated by a dynamic adjustment of the penalty applied to infeasible solutions. An extensive statistical analysis was carried out in order to identify the most important components of the algorithm and to properly tune the values of their parameters. The results of the computational experiments carried out show that this algorithm is very competitive in comparison to the best metaheuristic algorithms for the VRPB. Additionally, new best solutions have been found for two instances in one of the benchmark sets. These results show that the performance of existing metaheuristic algorithms can be considerably improved by carrying out a thorough statistical analysis of their components. In particular, it shows that by expanding the exploration area and improving the efficiency of the local search heuristic, it is possible to develop simpler and faster metaheuristic algorithms without compromising the quality of the solutions obtained.     

A truck scheduling problem arising in intermodal container transportation

We address a truck scheduling problem that arises in intermodal container transportation, where containers need to be transported between customers (shippers or receivers) and container terminals (rail or maritime) and vice versa. The transportation requests are handled by a trucking company which operates several depots and a fleet of homogeneous trucks that must be routed and scheduled to minimize the total truck operating time under hard time window constraints imposed by the customers and terminals. Empty containers are considered as transportation resources and are provided by the trucking company for freight transportation. The truck scheduling problem at hand is formulated as Full-Truckload Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows (FTPDPTW) and is solved by a 2-stage heuristic solution approach. This solution method was specially designed for the truck scheduling problem but can be applied to other problems as well. We assess the quality of our solution approach on several computational experiments.     

Creating lasso-solutions for the traveling salesman problem with pickup and delivery by Tabu search

We consider the Traveling Salesman Problem with Pickup and Delivery (TSPPD) where the same costumers might require both deloverie of goods and pickup of other goods. All the goods should be transported from/to the same depot. A vehicle on a TSPPD-tour could often get some practical problems when arranging the load. Even if the vehicle has enough space for all the pickups, one has to consider that they are stored in a way that doesn't block the delivery for the next customer. In real life problems this occurs for instance for breweries when they deliver bottles of beer or mineral water and collects empty bottles from the same customers on the same tour. In these situations we could relax the constraints of only checking Hamiltonian tours, and also try solutions that can visit customers in a way giving rise to a ‘alsso’ model. A solution which first only delivers bottles until the vehicle is partly unloaded, then do both delivery and pickup at the remaining customers and at last picks up the empty bottle from the first visited customers, could in these situations be better than a pure Hamiltonian tour, at least in a practical setting. To find such solutions, we will use the metaheuristic Tabu Search on some well known TSPPD-problems, and compare them to other kinds of solutions on the same problems.     

Expanding neighborhood search–GRASP for the probabilistic traveling salesman problem

The Probabilistic Traveling Salesman Problem is a variation of the classic traveling salesman problem and one of the most significant stochastic routing problems. In probabilistic traveling salesman problem only a subset of potential customers need to be visited on any given instance of the problem. The number of customers to be visited each time is a random variable. In this paper, a variant of the well-known Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP), the Expanding Neighborhood Search–GRASP, is proposed for the solution of the probabilistic traveling salesman problem. expanding neighborhood search–GRASP has been proved to be a very efficient algorithm for the solution of the traveling salesman problem. The proposed algorithm is tested on a numerous benchmark problems from TSPLIB with very satisfactory results. Comparisons with the classic GRASP algorithm and with a Tabu Search algorithm are also presented. Also, a comparison is performed with the results of a number of implementations of the Ant Colony Optimization algorithm from the literature and in six out of ten cases the proposed algorithm gives a new best solution.     

An efficient tabu search procedure for the p-Median Problem

In this paper we present a new solution heuristic for the p-Median Problem. The algorithm is based on tabu search principles, and uses short term and long term memory, as well as strategic oscillation and random tabu list sizes. Our proposed procedure is compared with two other move heuristics: a well-known interchange heuristic and a recent hybrid heuristic. In computational tests on networks ranging in size up to 500 nodes the new heuristic is found to be superior with respect to the quality of solutions produced.     

BoneRoute: An Adaptive Memory-Based Method for Effective Fleet Management

This paper presents an adaptive memory-based method for solving the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), called BoneRoute. The CVRP deals with the problem of finding the optimal sequence of deliveries conducted by a fleet of homogeneous vehicles, based at one depot, to serve a set of customers. The computational performance of the BoneRoute was found to be very efficient, producing high quality solutions over two sets of well known case studies examined.     

The Capacitated Team Orienteering Problem: A Bi-level Filter-and-Fan method

This paper focuses on vehicle routing problems with profits and addresses the so-called Capacitated Team Orienteering Problem. Given a set of customers with a priori known profits and demands, the objective is to find the subset of customers, for which the collected profit is maximized, and to determine the visiting sequence and assignment to vehicle routes assuming capacity and route duration restrictions. The proposed method adopts a hierarchical bi-level search framework that takes advantage of different search landscapes. At the upper level, the solution space is explored on the basis of the collected profit, using a Filter-and-Fan method and a combination of profit oriented neighborhoods, while at the lower level the routing of customers is optimized in terms of traveling distance via a Variable Neighborhood Descent method. Computational experiments on benchmark data sets illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Compared to existing results, new upper bounds are produced with competitive computational times.     

A hybrid heuristic approach for the multi-commodity one-to-one pickup-and-delivery traveling salesman problem

This paper addresses an extension of the Traveling Salesman Problem where a vehicle with a limited capacity must transport commodities. Each commodity has a weight, and exactly one origin and one destination. The objective is to find a minimum length Hamiltonian tour satisfying all the transportation requests without ever violating the capacity constraint. We propose for this problem a hybrid heuristic approach that combines the GRASP and VND metaheuristic techniques. Two variants of the method are presented, one of them using a mathematical programming based local search. We conduct computational experiments to compare the developed algorithms. The experiments show that they improve the best known solutions for a set of instances from the literature, and are able to cope with instances with up to 300 customers and 600 commodities in a reasonable amount of computation time.