Experience with a framework for developing heuristics for solving rich vehicle routing problems

According to Cordeau et al. (J Oper Res Soc 53(5):512–522, 2002) a good VRP heuristic should fulfill four criteria: accuracy, speed, simplicity, and flexibility. In this paper we report experience with a heuristic framework for solving rich vehicle routing problems (RVRP), which is based on rather simple heuristics. This heuristic framework has been implemented as flexible software framework. The user-friendly design enables flexible customization of problem-specific solvers. Our computational study on five RVRP reveals that the heuristic approach is rather robust with respect to parameterization and that the solvers which have been customized from the framework can compete with state-of-the-art special purpose developments.