A tabu search based approach for the Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem with three-dimensional loading constraints

Abstract

This paper studies a particular integration of the Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem with three-dimensional loading constraints (3L-HFVRP), which considers rectangular-shaped items to be delivered to customers and loading constraints to be satisfied. The resolution of this problem consists of assigning a loading plan to each used vehicle, while minimizing the total transportation cost. Clearly, the 3L-HFVRP is a combination of Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem (HFVRP) and Three Dimensional Single Container Loading Problem (3D-SCLP). In order to solve this problem, we propose a hybrid meta-heuristic approach based on a developed Tabu Search (TS) algorithm for the routing aspect and a modified Extreme Point based First Fit Decreasing (EP-FFD) heuristic for the loading sub-problem. New procedures have been proposed in the framework of this approach. Afterwards, numerical experiments on available sets of benchmark instances show that our new approach outperforms the current best algorithm for several instances. Indeed, the different experiments performed showed that our algorithm was able to find good solutions on 76% of the cases, which confirms the efficiency and performance of our approach in terms of solution quality.