Some experiments with a savings heuristic and a tabu search approach for the vehicle routing problem with multiple deliverymen

Abstract

In this work we consider a variant of the vehicle routing problem that allows the assignment of multiple deliverymen to one or more routes. A practical motivation for this variant arises, for example, in the distribution of beverages in highly dense urban areas, characterized by the difficulty in serving daily requests within regular working day hours with a single deliveryman per vehicle. We present a mathematical model and a savings algorithm in order to generate low cost routes that maximize the number of requests served in compliance with the maximum route time. The impact of the extra deliverymen on the solutions provided by the proposed heuristic is assessed by means of sets of generated examples based on classical instances of literature. It is also presented the results obtained by an adaptation of a tabu search approach from the literature. © 2012 Brazilian Operations Research Society.