Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search for Multitrip Vehicle Routing with Time Windows

Abstract

We consider a multitrip vehicle routing problem with time windows (MTVRPTW), in which each vehicle can perform several trips during its working shift. This problem is especially relevant in the context of city logistics. Heuristic solution methods for multitrip vehicle routing problems often separate routing and assignment phases to create trips and then assign them to the available vehicles. We show that this approach is outperformed by an integrated solution method in the presence of time windows. We use an automatic configuration tool to obtain efficient and contextualized implementations of our solution methods. We provide suitable instances for the MTVRPTW as well as an instance generator. Also, we discuss the relevance of two objective functions: the total duration and the total travel time. When minimizing the travel time, large increases in waiting time are incurred, which is not realistic in practice.