The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Three-Dimensional Loading Constraints and Split Delivery—A Case Study

Abstract

The capacitated vehicle routing problem with three-dimensional loading constraints (3L-CVRP) combines vehicle routing and three-dimensional loading with additional packing constraints concerning, for example, the stability of packed goods. We consider a logistics company that repeatedly has to pick up goods at different sites. Often, the load of one site exceeds the volume capacity of a vehicle. Therefore, we focus on the 3L-CVRP with split delivery and propose a hybrid algorithm for this problem. It consists of a tabu search procedure for routing and some packing heuristics with different tasks. One packing heuristic generates packing plans for shuttle tours involving special sites with large-volume sets of goods. Another heuristic cares for packing plans for tours with numerous sites. The hybrid algorithm is tested with a set of instances which differs from often used 3L-CVRP test instances and comes from real industrial data, with up to 46 sites and 1549 boxes to be transported. The algorithm yields good results within short computing times of less than 1 min.