The Impact of Metaheuristics on Solving the Vehicle Routing Problem: Algorithms, Problem Sets, and Computational Results

In the standard, capacitated vehicle routing problem (VRP), a homogeneous fleet of vehicles services a set of customers from a single depot. Each vehicle has a fixed capacity that cannot be exceeded and each customer has a known demand that must be satisfied. Each customer must be serviced by exactly one visit of a single vehicle and each vehicle must leave and return to the depot. There may be route-length restrictions that limit the distance traveled by each vehicle. The objective is to generate a sequence of deliveries for each vehicle so that all customers are serviced and the total distance traveled by the fleet is minimized.