Title: Solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem with two-dimensional loading constraints using a parallel VNS approach

Authors: Ines Sbai; Saoussen Krichen; Olfa Limam

Addresses: LARODEC Laboratory, Institut Supérieur de Gestion de Tunis, Université de Tunis, Tunisia ' LARODEC Laboratory, Institut Supérieur de Gestion de Tunis, Université de Tunis, Tunisia ' LARODEC Laboratory, Institut Supérieur d'Informatique de Tunis, Université de Tunis El Manar, Tunisia

Abstract: A combination of the two most important problems in logistics called the capacitated vehicle routing problem with two-dimensional loading constraint is studied in this article. It aims in designing the most appropriate pathways, starting and terminating at a central depot, minimising the total transportation cost with a homogenous fleet of vehicles. Items loaded in each vehicle's trip must satisfy the two-dimensional of orthogonal packing constraint. Since the problem is an NP-hard optimisation problem, a large number of approaches have been proposed. Whereas, finding the exact solution via optimisation is still a challenging problem due to their complexity. In order to increase the exploration in the solution space, we propose the parallel variable neighbourhood search algorithm. It is tested with 180 benchmark instances and compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The results showed that our approach is competitive in terms of the quality of solutions found.

Keywords: routing; packing; parallel variable neighbourhood search; 2L-CVRP; vehicle routing problem.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMHEUR.2022.127802

International Journal of Metaheuristics, 2022 Vol.8 No.1, pp.51 - 78

Received: 04 Oct 2019
Accepted: 16 Aug 2020
Published online: 19 Dec 2022 *

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