Vehicle routing problem with uniform private fleet and common carrier: a node subset heuristic

Optimizing the distribution of goods to customers is discussed on non-split delivery modification of vehicle routing problem with uniform private fleet and common carrier. While private fleet costs are proportional to the sum of distances traveled by its vehicles, common carrier has no capacity limit and costs are proportional to the quantity of transported goods only. We show the transformation of the model onto the vehicle routing problem with optional enter and propose a modified insert heuristic. The main contribution is a node subset heuristic based on dividing nodes into two subsets. The heuristic uses the node pre-selection for the private fleet while the rest is served by the common carrier. In the second step, both subsets are solved separately. The performance of the integer linear program and both proposed heuristics are compared on testing instances. Both heuristics can be used for finding the initial solution which can be further improved by local search methods.