Experiments with a local search heuristic for the multi-compartment vehicle routing problem May 19, 2009

Dr Luc Muyldermans of Nottingham University Business School will be presenting this seminar as part of a series from Salford's Management & Management Sciences Research Institute.

The multi-compartment vehicle routing problem involves clients with a demand for different products and vehicles with several compartments to co-transport these commodities.

We present a local search procedure that explores well-known moves (2-opt, cross, exchange, relocate), and that exploits the mechanisms of neighbour lists and marking to speed up the searches.

We combine the procedure with the Guided Local Search meta-heuristic to improve solution quality further. Extensive computational results are reported to uncover when co-distribution by vehicles with multiple compartments is better than separate distribution with un-partitioned trucks. Sensitivities in key problem parameters including, client density and location of the depot, vehicle capacity, client demand and number of commodities are investigated.

Official Website: http://www.salford.ac.uk/events/details/930