A sequential insertion heuristic for the initial solution to a constrained vehicle routing problem

Abstract

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a well-researched problem in the Operations Research literature. It is the view of the authors of this paper that the various VRP variants have been researched in isolation. This paper embodies an attempt to integrate three specific variants of the VRP, namely the VRP with multiple time windows, the VRP with a heterogeneous fleet, and the VRP with double scheduling, into an initial solution algorithm. The proposed initial solution algorithm proves feasible for the integration, while the newly introduced concept of time window compatibility decreases the computational burden when using benchmark data sets from literature as a basis for efficiency testing. The algorithm also improves the quality of the initial solution for a number of problem classes.