Advanced vehicle routing algorithms for complex operations management problems

Vehicle routing encompasses a whole class of complex optimization problems that target the derivation of minimum total cost routes for a number of resources (vehicles) located at a central point (depot) in order to service efficiently a number of demand points (customers). Several practical issues in the food industry, involving both production and transportation decisions are modelled as VRP instances and are hard combinatorial problems in the strong sense (NP-hard). For such problems, metaheuristics, i.e., general solution procedures that explore the solution space to identify high quality solutions and often embed some standard route construction and improvement algorithms have been proposed. This paper surveys the recent research efforts on metaheuristic solution methodologies for the standard and most widely studied version of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), i.e., the Capacitated VRP. The computational performance of each metaheuristic is presented for the 14 benchmark instances of Christofides et al.