Multistart Evolutionary Local Search for a Disaster Relief Problem

This paper studies the multitrip cumulative capacitated vehicle routing problem (mt-CCVRP), a variant of the classical capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP). In the mt-CCVRP the objective function becomes the minimization of the sum of arrival times at required nodes and each vehicle may perform more than one trip. Applications of this NP-Hard problem can be found in disaster logistics. This article presents a Multistart Evolutionary Local Search (MS-ELS) that alternates between giant tour and mt-CCVRP solutions, and uses an adapted split procedure and a variable neighborhood descent (VND). The results on two sets of instances show that this approach finds very good results in relatively short computing time compared with a multistart iterated local search which works directly on the mt-CCVRP solution space.