TY - JOUR
T1 - An adaptive guidance meta-heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with splits and clustered backhauls
AU - Lai, Michela
AU - Battarra, Maria
AU - Di Francesco, Massimo
AU - Zuddas, Paola
PY - 2015/7
Y1 - 2015/7
N2 - This paper presents the case study of an Italian carrier, Grendi Trasporti Marittimi, which provides freight transportation services by trucks and containers. Its trucks deliver container loads from a port to import customers and collect container loads from export customers to the same port. In this case study, all import customers in a route must be serviced before all export customers, each customer can be visited more than once and containers are never unloaded or reloaded from the truck chassis along any route. We model the problem using an Integer Linear Programming formulation and propose an Adaptive Guidance metaheuristic. Our extensive computational experiments show that the adaptive guidance algorithm is capable of determining good-quality solutions in many instances of practical or potential interest for the carrier within 10 min of computing time, whereas the mathematical formulation often fails to provide the first feasible solution within 3 h of computing time.
AB - This paper presents the case study of an Italian carrier, Grendi Trasporti Marittimi, which provides freight transportation services by trucks and containers. Its trucks deliver container loads from a port to import customers and collect container loads from export customers to the same port. In this case study, all import customers in a route must be serviced before all export customers, each customer can be visited more than once and containers are never unloaded or reloaded from the truck chassis along any route. We model the problem using an Integer Linear Programming formulation and propose an Adaptive Guidance metaheuristic. Our extensive computational experiments show that the adaptive guidance algorithm is capable of determining good-quality solutions in many instances of practical or potential interest for the carrier within 10 min of computing time, whereas the mathematical formulation often fails to provide the first feasible solution within 3 h of computing time.
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/jors.2014.123
U2 - 10.1057/jors.2014.123
DO - 10.1057/jors.2014.123
M3 - Article
VL - 66
SP - 1222
EP - 1235
JO - Journal of the Operational Research Society
JF - Journal of the Operational Research Society
SN - 0160-5682
IS - 7
ER -