Truck and trailer routing-Problems, heuristics and computational experience

In the truck and trailer routing problem (TTRP) the vehicle fleet consists of truck units and trailer units with some customers only accessible by truck. For that purpose trailers can be uncoupled en-route at customers where truck sub-tours are built. We discuss several variants of this specific rich vehicle routing problem (RVRP): the TTRP with and without the option of load transfer between truck and trailer as well as the requirement of time windows for delivery. We present computational experience with a simple and flexible hybrid approach which is based on local search and large neighborhood search as well as standard metaheuristic control strategies. This approach which has shown to be rather effective on several other RVRP-classes before can compete with complex state-of-the-art approaches with respect to speed and accuracy on the TTRP too. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.