A New Metaheuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Split Demands

摘要

In this paper we present a metaheuristic procedure constructed for the special case of the Vehicle Routing Problem in which the demands of the clients can be split, i.e., any client can be serviced by more than one vehicle. The proposed algorithm, based on the scatter search methodology, produces a feasible solution using the minimum number of vehicles. The results obtained compare with the best results known up to date on a set of instances previously published in the literature.