Title: A general variable neighbourhood search for the commodity constrained split delivery vehicle routing problem

Authors: Mohamed Cheikh; Taicir Moalla Loukil

Addresses: Modeling and Optimization for Decisional, Industrial and Logistic Systems Laboratory, Department of Quantitative Methods, Faculty of Economics and Management, University of Sfax, LR11ES44, Tunisia ' Modeling and Optimization for Decisional, Industrial and Logistic Systems Laboratory, Department of Quantitative Methods, Faculty of Economics and Management, University of Sfax, LR11ES44, Tunisia

Abstract: The commodity constrained split delivery vehicle routing problem (C-SDVRP) is a relaxed version of the classical VRP. This problem emanates where customers request several commodities that can be delivered separately using a set of vehicles. With limited capacity, these vehicles can convey any mixed commodities set. More than one vehicle may visit one customer, and in each visit, each product must be delivered in its entirety. The objective is to minimise the total cost of the vehicle routes. To solve the C-SDVRP, we propose a general variable neighbourhood search (GVNS) that uses a random variable neighbourhood descent (RVND), in which we explore five neighbourhood structures. Computational experiments on large-sized instances show that the proposed approach finds several new best-known solutions, together with some improvement on the number of used vehicles. The results demonstrate that GVNS has a fast convergence rate and high computational accuracy.

Keywords: vehicle routing problem; multiple commodities; split delivery; metaheuristics; variable neighbourhood search.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2023.131421

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2023 Vol.45 No.2, pp.249 - 267

Received: 21 Aug 2020
Accepted: 10 Mar 2021
Published online: 12 Jun 2023 *

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