Variable Neighborhood Search Algorithm for Fleet Size and Mixed Vehicle Routing Problem

The fleet size and mixed vehicle routing problem(FSMVRP) is a variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem(VRP),in which the vehicles are heterogeneous.Based on the variable neighborhood search,a heuristic algorithm VNS_FSM was proposed for solving the FSMVRP.In the VNS_FSM,the neighborhood structure combinations were designed to implement the shaking and local search procedure in the VNS.Additionally,a new vehicle type adjustment method was presented.Computational experiments were carried out on benchmark problems to validate the effectiveness of the proposed VND_FSM.The correct solutions to problems G_07 to G_12 were given.Experimental results show that the proposed heuristic VNS_FSM can obtain the best known solutions to most benchmark problems.The VNS_FSM performs quite competitively or even better when compared with other state-of-the-art heuristics.