Neighborhood search approaches for multi-trip vehicle routing problems

editorial reviewedWe introduce two large neighborhood search approaches for solving the multi-trip vehicle routing problem (MTVRP), where each vehicle can perform several routes to serve a set of customers. The problem specifically arises when travel times between customers are short and/or when demands are large. It has been commonly solved in the literature by mixing vehicle routing heuristics and bin packing techniques aimed at assigning routes to vehicles. As an alternative, we propose specific operators that tackle the routing and the assignment aspects of the problem simultaneously. The introduced methods are compared both for the MTVRP and the version with time windows, in which the assignment part of the problem becomes more challenging. In the latter, besides considering a time window at the depot, the working time of each vehicle may not exceed a maximum duration, while its start time is a decision variable. Beyond providing several best known solutions for benchmark instances of the MTVRP, we focus on understanding the behavior of the algorithms. An automatic configuration tool is used, not only to improve the quality of the results, but also as a mean to gain knowledge about algorithm design options and their interactions. We question the impact of several heuristic components and in particular those of the roulette wheel mechanism and of the adaptive memory of routes