Abstract
We present a metaheuristic called the reactive guided tabu search (RGTS) to solve the heterogeneous fleet multicompartment vehicle routing problem (MCVRP), where a single vehicle is required for cotransporting multiple customer orders. MCVRP is commonly found in delivery of fashion apparel, petroleum distribution, food distribution, and waste collection. In searching the optimum solution of MCVRP, we need to handle a large amount of local optima in the solution spaces. To overcome this problem, we design three guiding mechanisms in which the search history is used to guide the search. The three mechanisms are experimentally demonstrated to be more efficient than the ones which only apply the known distance information. Armed with the guiding mechanisms and the well-known reactive mechanism, the RGTS can produce remarkable solutions in a reasonable computation time.
Highlights
In areas such as delivery of fashion apparel, petroleum distribution, chemical transportation, food delivery, and waste recycling, due to the characteristics of the products, vehicles with multiple separated compartments are indispensable for delivering to clients who require delivery of more than one type of product
To the best of our knowledge, no instances are publicly available for the HFFMCVRP; we generate test instances based on the existing HFFVRP instances, which themselves are generated from classic vehicle routing problem (VRP) instances
The first row lists different guiding mechanisms, where “VT” represents the mechanisms using the utility function and penalty term proposed by Voudouris and Tsang [29] and “T” represents the one proposed by Tarantilis et al [25], while “U1,” “U2,” and “U3” are mechanisms with utility functions U1, U2, and U3, respectively, and the standard penalty term
Summary
In areas such as delivery of fashion apparel, petroleum distribution, chemical transportation, food delivery, and waste recycling, due to the characteristics of the products, vehicles with multiple separated compartments are indispensable for delivering to (or picking up from) clients who require delivery (or pick-up) of more than one (incompatible) type of product. Even though the fleet is very likely homogeneous in the inception of a distribution company, after a long time in business, the company tends to own heterogeneous vehicles as a result of vehicle market changes (they would buy different vehicles at different costs) and the different depreciation rates of vehicles [10]. It may be wiser for the company to possess/operate a heterogeneous fleet for business flexibility since it can meet different needs of clients
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