A late acceptance hill-climbing heuristic algorithm for the double vehicle routing problem with multiple stacks and heterogeneous demand

Abstract

We propose a heuristic algorithm based on the Late Acceptance Hill-Climbing metaheuristic for solving the Double Vehicle Routing Problem with Multiple Stacks and Heterogeneous Demand (DVRPMSHD). In this problem, customers must be served by a fleet of vehicles, which have their containers divided into horizontal stacks, where each load/unload operation has to obey the last-in-first-out policy. Each customer has a pickup location and a delivery location, where demand items must be collected and delivered, respectively. All demand of a specific customer cannot be split between the vehicles. The DVRPMSHD goal is to find optimal tours to visit all pickup and delivery locations while ensuring the feasibility of the loading plan of each vehicle. We have tested our algorithm on the benchmark instances and experimental results showed that our approach is highly competitive with other solution approaches already present in the literature.