Large Neighborhood Search for rich VRP with multiple pickup and delivery locations

In this paper we consider a rich vehicle routing problem where transportation requests are characterised by multiple pickup and delivery locations. The problem is a combined load acceptance and generalised vehicle routing problem incorporating a diversity of practical complexities. Among those are time window restrictions, a heterogeneous vehicle fleet with different travel times, travel costs and capacity, multi-dimensional capacity constraints, order/vehicle compatibility constraints, and different start and end locations for vehicles. We propose iterative improvement approaches based on Large Neighborhood Search and a relatedness measure for transportation requests with multiple pickup and delivery locations. Our algorithms are characterised by very fast response times and thus, can be used within dynamic routing systems where input data can change at any time