On solving the Multi-depot Vehicle routing problem

Abstract

Problems associated with seeking the lowest cost vehicle routes to deliver demand from a set of depots to a set of customers are called Multi-depot Vehicle Routing Problems (MDVRP). The MDVRP is a generalization of the standard vehicle routing problem which involves more than one depot. In MDVRP each vehicle leaves a depot and should return to the same depot they started with. In this paper, the MDVRP is tackled using a iterated local search metaheuristic. Experiments are run on a number of benchmark instances of varying depots and customer sizes. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithm is competitive against state-of-the-art methods.