The vehicle routing problem
Tabu Search
SLS'07 Proceedings of the 2007 international conference on Engineering stochastic local search algorithms: designing, implementing and analyzing effective heuristics
Heuristics for a real-world mail delivery problem
EvoApplications'11 Proceedings of the 2011 international conference on Applications of evolutionary computation - Volume Part II
Development and assessment of the SHARP and RandSHARP algorithms for the arc routing problem
AI Communications - 18th RCRA International Workshop on “Experimental evaluation of algorithms for solving problems with combinatorial explosion”
Bi-Objective Bus Routing: An Application to School Buses in Rural Areas
Transportation Science
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We describe a special variant of the vehicle routing problem (VRP), where there are many customers per road segment. This class of VRPs arises in, e.g. mail delivery, and is a borderline case where both arc routing and node routing techniques may be applied for modeling and solving. In a real-world setting, the problem should be modeled so as to incorporate all important constraining factors. We use a simplified node routing model and aggregate customers into supernodes to reduce problem size. A tabu search metaheuristic for the standard node routing-based VRP is then applied to the aggregated version of the problem. Our method is tested both on test instances from the literature as well as on a portfolio of new test instances especially made to fit the problem at hand. Experimental results are reported, showing that aggregation of customers can lead to substantial improvements both in solution time and solution quality in this setting, especially for larger instances.