A hybrid heuristic method for the fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem

Numerous heuristic methods have been proposed for the fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem (FSMVRP), since the FSMVRP is an NP-hard problem. However, the vehicle type information is always ignored in the local improvement approaches of these heuristic methods. Hence, the solutions found by these heuristic methods without the vehicle type information are worse than those with the vehicle type information. In this paper, a hybrid heuristic method, incorporating the vehicle type information into variable neighborhood search (VNS), is proposed. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method is better than other reported methods and VNS without the vehicle type information in terms of average percentage deviation.