An effective tabu search approach with improved loading algorithms for the 3L-CVRP

In this paper, we consider the Three-Dimensional Loading Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (3L-CVRP) which combines the routing of a fleet of vehicles and the loading of three-dimensional shaped goods into the vehicles while minimizing the total travel distance incurred. Apparently, 3L-CVRP is a combination of capacitated vehicle routing and three-dimensional bin packing problem and thus of high complexity. Different from most of previous works, we propose an innovative approach, called improved least waste heuristic for solving the loading subproblem, which is iteratively invoked by a simple tabu search algorithm for the routing. The good performance in terms of the solution quality and computational efficiency of our approach is shown through the numerical experiments on the benchmark instances from literature. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.