A new heuristic for the fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of simultaneously selecting the composition and routing of a fleet of vehicles in order to service efficiently customers with known demands from a central depot. This problem is called the fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem (FSMVRP). The vehicle fleet may be heterogeneous. The objective is to find the fleet composition and a set of routes with minimum total cost, which includes routing cost and vehicle cost. We present a new savings heuristic based on successive route fusion. At each iteration, the best fusion is selected by solving a weighted matching problem. This provides a less myoptic criteria than the usual savings heuristics. This algorithm is also very easy to implement. Computational results are provided for a number of benchmark problems in order to compare its performance to that of various other methods.

Résumé

Nous considérons le problème du choix de la flotte de véhicules. L'objectif est de minimiser la somme des coûts, i.e. la somme des distances parcourues et la somme des coûts fixes. Nous présentons un nouvel heuristique pour la construction de tournées basé sur la résolution d'un problème de couplage. Le couplage de poids maximum permets de choisir de façon non-myope la “meilleure” séquence de fusion de tournées. Nous avons testé notre approche sur plusieurs problèmes connus.