The pyramidal capacitated vehicle routing problem

This paper introduces the pyramidal capacitated vehicle routing problem (PCVRP) as a restricted version of the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP). In the PCVRP each route is required to be pyramidal in a sense generalized from the pyramidal traveling salesman problem (PTSP). A pyramidal route is defined as a route on which the vehicle first visits customers in increasing order of customer index, and on the remaining part of the route visits customers in decreasing order of customer index.