A two-level variable neighbourhood search for the Euclidean clustered vehicle routing problem

Christof Defryn and Kenneth Sörensen

Working Papers from University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics

Abstract: In this paper, a metaheuristic approach is presented to solve the Clustered Vehicle Routing Problem (CluVRP). The CluVRP, in which customers are grouped into predefined clusters, can be seen as a generalization of the classical Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). When serving all these customers with a given fleet of vehicles it should be ensured that clients belonging to the same cluster are served by one vehicle, sequentially in the same path (CluVRP with hard cluster constraints). In a second phase, these constraints will be relaxed as we will define the CluVRP with so? cluster constraints. The proposed metaheuristic approach tries to find the optimal solution for both problems by combining two variable neighbourhood search algorithms, exploring the distribution area at two different levels. ?The algorithm is tested on different benchmark instances from the literature with up to 484 nodes, obtaining high quality solutions.

Keywords: Clustered Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP); Variable neighbourhood search; Metaheuristics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp and nep-tre
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ant:wpaper:2015002

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