Vehicle routing in a Spanish distribution company: Saving using a savings‐based heuristic

In this article we present a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) faced by a large distribution company in the Northeast of Spain. The company distributes products from its central facilities to a chain of around 400 stores all over the country. One of the peculiarities of the VRP of this company – which is common among real‐life VRPs – is the presence of a heterogeneous fleet where vehicles with different capacities can make multiple trips during a single day. This variant of the problem, which we refer as Heterogeneous Fleet and Multi‐trip VRP, has been barely studied in the literature. To solve the problem, we use an algorithm based on the well‐known savings heuristic with a biased‐randomization effect and three local search operations. Our approach is simple to implement as it needs few parameters and no fine‐tuning processes, which are usually cumbersome and require experts’ involvement. We obtain savings of around 12 per cent in transportation costs, which represent around \[euro]30000 saved per week.