Matheuristics for solving a multi-attribute collection problem for a charity organisation

This paper studies a real‐life multi‐attribute profit collecting vehicle routing problem, arising in the collection operations of a charity organisation in the United Kingdom. The problem involves a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles of different capacities, mandatory visits to a subset of vertices, time windows, rest requirements associated with maximum driving and working times, and partial collection. A mixed integer programming formulation of the problem is described, along with three matheuristics based on Tabu Search and Large Neighbourhood Search. Computational results on instances derived from the case study are presented, and insights are given from a practical implementation.