Vehicle routing with compartments: applications, modelling and heuristics

Despite the vast amount of literature about vehicle routing problems, only very little attention has been paid to vehicles with compartments that allow transportation of inhomogeneous products on the same vehicle, but in different compartments. We motivate a general vehicle routing problem with compartments that is essential for several industries, like the distribution of food or petrol. We introduce a formal model, an integer program formulation and a benchmark suite of 200 instances. A solver suite of heuristic components is presented, which covers a broad range of alternative approaches for construction, local search, large neighbourhood search and meta-heuristics. The empirical results for the benchmark instances identify effective algorithmic setups as well as essential components for achieving high solution quality. In a comparison on 23 specific and combinatorially less complex instances taken from literature, our algorithm showed to be competitive.