Metaheuristic approaches for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and multiple deliverymen

Abstract

This paper addresses the vehicle routing problem with time windows and multiple deliverymen, a variant of the vehicle routing problem which includes the decision of the crew size of each delivery vehicle, besides the usual scheduling and routing decisions. This problem arises in the distribution of goods in congested urban areas where, due to the relatively long service times, it may be difficult to serve all customers within regular working hours. Given this difficulty, an alternative consists in resorting to additional deliverymen to reduce the service times, which typically leads to extra costs in addition to travel and vehicle usage costs. The objective is to define routes for serving clusters of customers, while minimizing the number of routes, the total number of assigned deliverymen, and the distance traveled. Two metaheuristic approaches based on Iterated Local Search and Large Neighborhood Search are proposed to solve this problem. The performance of the approaches is evaluated using sets of instances from the literature.

Keywords:
Vehicle routing; Multiple deliverymen; Iterated Local Search; Large Neighborhood Search