A biased‐randomized algorithm for the two‐dimensional vehicle routing problem with and without item rotations

This paper proposes an efficient algorithm, with a reduced number of parameters, for solving the two‐dimensional loading‐capacitated vehicle routing problem (2L‐CVRP). This problem combines two of the most important issues in logistics, that is, vehicle routing and packing problems. Our approach contemplates unrestricted loading including the possibility of applying 90° rotations to each rectangular‐shaped item while loading it into the vehicle, which is a realistic assumption seldom considered in the existing literature. The algorithm uses a multistart approach that is designed to avoid local minima and also to make the algorithm an easily parallelizable one. At each restart, a biased randomization of a savings‐based routing algorithm is combined with an enhanced version of a classical packing heuristic to produce feasible good solutions for the 2L‐CVRP. The proposed algorithm has been compared with the classical benchmarks for two different 2L‐CVRP variants, that is, with and without item rotations. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms several best‐known solutions from previous work, both in terms of quality and the computational time needed to obtain them.     

Agile optimization of a two‐echelon vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery

In this paper, we consider a vehicle routing problem in which a fleet of homogeneous vehicles, initially located at a depot, has to satisfy customers' demands in a two‐echelon network: first, the vehicles have to visit intermediate nodes (e.g., a retail center or a consolidation center), where they deliver raw materials or bulk products and collect a number of processed items requested by the customers in their route; then, the vehicles proceed to complete their assigned routes, thus delivering the processed items to the final customers before returning to the depot. During this stage, vehicles might visit other intermediate nodes for reloading new items. In some real‐life scenarios, this problem needs to be solved in just a few seconds or even milliseconds, which leads to the concept of “agile optimization.” This might be the case in some rescue operations using drones in humanitarian logistics, where every second can be decisive to save lives. In order to deal with this real‐time two‐echelon vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery, an original constructive heuristic is proposed. This heuristic is able to provide a feasible and reasonably good solution in just a few milliseconds. The constructive heuristic is extended into a biased‐randomized algorithm using a skewed probability distribution to modify its greedy behavior. This way, parallel runs of the algorithm are able to generate even better results without violating the real‐time constraint. Results show that the proposed methodology generates competitive results in milliseconds, being able to outperform other heuristics from the literature.     

Discussion related to “Wang,C.-H., & Lu,J.-Z. (2009). A hybrid genetic algorithm that optimizes capacitated vehicle routing problem. Expert Systems with Applications, 36(2), 2921–2936”

This paper presents a discussion arisen after reading “A hybrid genetic algorithm that optimizes capacitated vehicle routing problem”, by Wang & Lu, (Wang, C.-H., & Lu, J.-Z. (2009). A hybrid genetic algorithm that optimizes capacitated vehicle routing problems. Expert System with Applications, 35, 2921–2936.). The discussed paper presents a hybrid genetic algorithm applied to the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). When the authors present the results obtained by the technique, they claim to have overcome the best-known solution in two instances of Christofides and Eilon CVRP Benchmark. This statement can create confusion and controversy, for several reasons that we will explain and clarify in this short communication.     

An adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic for the cumulative capacitated vehicle routing problem

The cumulative capacitated vehicle routing problem (CCVRP) is a variation of the classical capacitated vehicle routing problem in which the objective is the minimization of the sum of arrival times at customers, instead of the total routing cost. This paper presents an adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic for the CCVRP. This algorithm is applied to a set of benchmark instances and compared with two recently published memetic algorithms.     

Battery swap station location-routing problem with capacitated electric vehicles

In this paper, we present an electric vehicles battery swap stations location routing problem (BSS–EV–LRP), which aims to determine the location strategy of battery swap stations (BSSs) and the routing plan of a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) simultaneously under battery driving range limitation. The problem is formulated as an integer programming model under the basic and extended scenarios. A four-phase heuristic called SIGALNS and a two-phase Tabu Search-modified Clarke and Wright Savings heuristic (TS-MCWS) are proposed to solve the problem. In the proposed SIGALNS, the BSSs location stage and the vehicle routing stage are alternated iteratively, which considers the information from the routing plan while improving the location strategy. In the first phase, an initial routing plan is generated with a modified sweep algorithm, leading to the BSSs location subproblem, which is then solved by using an iterated greedy heuristic. In the third phase, the vehicle routes resulting from the location subproblem are determined by applying an adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic with several new neighborhood structures. At the end of SIGALNS, the solution is further improved by a split procedure. Compared with the MIP solver of CPLEX and TS-MCWS over three sets of instances, SIGALNS searches the solution space more efficiently, thus producing good solutions without excessive computation on the medium and large instances. Furthermore, we systematically conduct economic and environmental analysis including the comparison between basic and extended scenarios, sensitivity analysis on battery driving range and efficiency analysis about the vehicle emissions reduction when EVs are used in the logistics practice.     

策略梯度的超启发算法求解带容量约束车辆路径问题

有容量车辆路径问题是组合优化问题中比较热门的问题, 它属于经典的NP-hard问题并且时间复杂度高.本文提出了一种基于策略梯度的超启发算法, 将强化学习中的确定性策略梯度算法引入到超启发算法的高层策略中的底层算法选择策略, 确定性策略梯度算法采用Actor-Critic框架, 另外为了能够在后续计算和神经网络参数更新中引用历史经验数据, 在确定性策略梯度算法中设计了经验池用于存储状态转移数据. 在超启发算法解的接受准则方面, 文中通过实验对比了3种接受准则的效果, 最终选择了自适应接受准则作为高层策略中解的接受准则. 通过对有容量车辆路径问题标准算例的计算, 并将求解结果与其他算法对比, 验证了所提算法在该问题求解上的有效性和稳定性.     

Combining biased randomization with iterated local search for solving the multidepot vehicle routing problem

This paper proposes a hybrid approach for solving the multidepot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP) with a limited number of identical vehicles per depot. Our approach, which only uses a few parameters, combines “biased randomization”—use of nonsymmetric probability distributions to generate randomness—with the iterated local search (ILS) metaheuristic. Two biased‐randomized processes are employed at different stages of the ILS framework in order to (a) assign customers to depots following a randomized priority criterion—this allows for fast generation of alternative allocation maps and (b) improving routing solutions associated with a “promising” allocation map—this is done by randomizing the classical savings heuristic. These biased‐randomized processes rely on the use of the geometric probability distribution, which is characterized by a single and bounded parameter. Being an approach with few parameters, our algorithm does not require troublesome fine‐tuning processes, which tend to be time consuming. Using standard benchmarks, the computational experiments show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. Despite its hybrid nature, our approach is relatively easy to implement and can be parallelized in a very natural way, which makes it an interesting alternative for practical applications of the MDVRP.     

Skewed general variable neighborhood search for the cumulative capacitated vehicle routing problem

The cumulative capacitated vehicle routing problem (CCVRP) is a relatively new version of the classical capacitated vehicle routing problem, and it is equivalent to a traveling repairman problem with capacity constraints and a homogeneous vehicle fleet, which aims to minimize the total arrival time at customers. Many real‐world applications can be modeled by this problem, such as the important application resulting from the humanitarian aid following a natural disaster. In this paper, two heuristics are proposed. The first one is a constructive heuristic to generate an initial solution and the second is the skewed variable neighborhood search (SVNS) heuristic. The SVNS algorithm starts with the initial solution. At each iteration, the perturbation phase and the local search phase are used to improve the solution of the CCVRP, and the distance function in acceptance criteria phase is used to improve the exploration of faraway valleys. This algorithm is applied to a set of benchmarks, and the comparison results show that the proposed algorithms provide better solutions than those reported in the previous literature on memetic algorithms and adaptive large neighborhood search heuristics.     

基于启发式带时间窗的车辆路径规划问题求解

车辆路径规划问题广泛地存在于现代物流行业中,该问题属于NP难的组合优化问题.随着客户需求的多样化、道路限行等因素的影响,该问题变得更加的复杂,采用传统的组合优化方法和运筹学方法往往难以求解.本文对一类常见的带时间窗的车辆路径规划问题进行了研究,根据时间窗参数来调整客户的优先级,以减少车辆的等待时间,由此改进了几个常见的启发式算法,并对56个常见的车辆路径规划问题进行了测试,实验结果表明,改进的节约算法在带容量约束的车辆路径问题中效果较好,改进的插入法则在带时间窗的车辆路径问题中具有优越性,另外,改进的启发式算法在4个测试用例上使用更多车辆时可使总路程优于已知最优值.     

A hybrid algorithm for the capacitated vehicle routing problem with three-dimensional loading constraints

The capacitated vehicle routing problem with three-dimensional loading constraints combines capacitated vehicle routing and three-dimensional loading with additional packing constraints concerning, for example, unloading operations. An efficient hybrid algorithm including a tabu search algorithm for routing and a tree search algorithm for loading is introduced. Computational results are presented for all publicly available test instances. Most of the best solutions previously reported in literature have been improved while the computational effort is drastically reduced compared to other methods.     

A general heuristic for vehicle routing problems

We present a unified heuristic which is able to solve five different variants of the vehicle routing problem: the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), the multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP), the site-dependent vehicle routing problem (SDVRP) and the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP).     

An enhanced ant colony optimization (EACO) applied to capacitated vehicle routing problem

In this paper, an enhanced ant colony optimization (EACO) is proposed for capacitated vehicle routing problem. The capacitated vehicle routing problem is to service customers with known demands by a homogeneous fleet of fixed capacity vehicles starting from a depot. It plays a major role in the field of logistics and belongs to NP-hard problems. Therefore, it is difficult to solve the capacitated vehicle routing problem directly when solutions increase exponentially with the number of serviced customers. The framework of this paper is to develop an enhanced ant colony optimization for the capacitated vehicle routing problem. It takes the advantages of simulated annealing and ant colony optimization for solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem. In the proposed algorithm, simulated annealing provides a good initial solution for ant colony optimization. Furthermore, an information gain based ant colony optimization is used to ameliorate the search performance. Computational results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to original ant colony optimization and simulated annealing separately reported on fourteen small-scale instances and twenty large-scale instances.     

Extended guided tabu search and a new packing algorithm for the two-dimensional loading vehicle routing problem

In this paper, we develop an extended guided tabu search (EGTS) and a new heuristic packing algorithm for the two-dimensional loading vehicle routing problem (2L-CVRP). The 2L-CVRP is a combination of two well-known NP-hard problems, the capacitated vehicle routing problem, and the two-dimensional bin packing problem. It is very difficult to get a good performance solution in practice for these problems. We propose a meta-heuristic methodology EGTS which incorporates theories of tabu search and extended guided local search (EGLS). It has been proved that tabu search is a very good approach for the CVRP, and the guiding mechanism of the EGLS can help tabu search to escape effectively from local optimum. Furthermore, we have modified a collection of packing heuristics by adding a new packing heuristic to solve the loading constraints in 2L-CVRP, in order to improve the cost function significantly. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is tested, and proven by extensive computational experiments on benchmark instances.     

An improved fireworks algorithm for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), which aims at minimizing travel costs, is a wellknown NP-hard combinatorial optimization. Owing to its hardness, many heuristic search algorithms have been proposed to tackle this problem. This paper explores a recently proposed heuristic algorithm named the fireworks algorithm (FWA), which is a swarm intelligence algorithm. We adopt FWA for the combinatorial CVRP problem with several modifications of the original FWA: it employs a new method to generate "sparks" according to the selection rule, and it uses a new method to determine the explosion amplitude for each firework. The proposed algorithm is compared with several heuristic search methods on some classical benchmark CVRP instances. The experimental results show a promising performance of the proposed method. We also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our algorithm in contrast to traditional algorithms.     

A 2-phase constructive algorithm for cumulative vehicle routing problems with limited duration

The Clarke & Wright (C&W) algorithm is one of the most widely used classical heuristics in capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) in which a linear function of distance is considered as the objective function. The C&W algorithm is very simple and easy to implement, and produces fairly good solutions very fast. In this study, the C&W algorithm is adopted for the cumulative VRP with limited duration (CumVRP-LD) where load is also considered in the objective function as well as distance. The most common applications of cumulative VRPs are the determination of routing policies that minimize total fuel consumption. A 2-phase constructive heuristic approach including the K-means clustering algorithm is proposed to improve the computational performance of the modified C&W algorithm for CumVRP-LD. The main contribution of this study is the definition of a new extended formulation that captures truck-load and travel distance by considering the unique characteristics of the problem and to develop a fast and easy implemented constructive algorithm for CumVRP-LD. Such approaches are necessary for the development of systems that respond fast, possibly online, to changes in the real problem situations.     

The capacitated vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands and time windows

The capacitated vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands and time windows is an extension of the capacitated vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands, in which demands are stochastic and a time window is imposed on each vertex. A vertex failure occurring when the realized demand exceeds the vehicle capacity may trigger a chain reaction of failures on the remaining vertices in the same route, as a result of time windows. This paper models this problem as a stochastic program with recourse, and proposes an adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic for its solution. Modified Solomon benchmark instances are used in the experiments. Computational results clearly show the superiority of the proposed heuristic over an alternative solution approach.     

Variable Neighborhood Search heuristic for the Inventory Routing Problem in fuel delivery

In this paper we observe the extension of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) in fuel delivery that includes petrol stations inventory management and which can be classified as the Inventory Routing Problem (IRP) in fuel delivery. The objective of the IRP is to minimize the total cost of vehicle routing and inventory management. We developed a Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) heuristic for solving a multi-product multi-period IRP in fuel delivery with multi-compartment homogeneous vehicles, and deterministic consumption that varies with each petrol station and each fuel type. The stochastic VNS heuristic is compared to a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model and the deterministic “compartment transfer” (CT) heuristic. For three different scale problems, with different vehicle types, the developed VNS heuristic outperforms the deterministic CT heuristic. Also, for the smallest scale problem instances, the developed VNS was capable of obtaining the near optimal and optimal solutions (the MILP model was able to solve only the smallest scale problem instances).     

An effective tabu search approach with improved loading algorithms for the 3L-CVRP

In this paper, we consider the Three-Dimensional Loading Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem(3L-CVRP) which combines the routing of a fleet of vehicles and the loading of three-dimensional shaped goods into the vehicles while minimizing the total travel distance incurred. Apparently, 3L-CVRP is a combination of capacitated vehicle routing and three-dimensional bin packing problem and thus of high complexity. Different from most of previous works, we propose an innovative approach, called improved least waste heuristic for solving the loading subproblem, which is iteratively invoked by a simple tabu search algorithm for the routing. The good performance in terms of the solution quality and computational efficiency of our approach is shown through the numerical experiments on the benchmark instances from literature.     

A deterministic tabu search algorithm for the capacitated arc routing problem

The capacitated arc routing problem (CARP) is a difficult optimisation problem in vehicle routing with applications where a service must be provided by a set of vehicles on specified roads. A heuristic algorithm based on tabu search is proposed and tested on various sets of benchmark instances. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm produces high quality results within a reasonable computing time. Some new best solutions are reported for a set of test problems used in the literature.