An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search for Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

The heterogeneous vehicle routing problem with time windows (HVRPTW) employs various vehicles with different capacities to serve upcoming pickup and delivery orders. We introduce a HVRPTW variant for reflecting the practical needs of crowd-shipping by considering the mass-rapid-transit stations, as the additional terminal points. A mixed integer linear programming model is formulated. An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search based meta-heuristic is also developed by utilizing a basic probabilistic selection strategy, i.e. roulette wheel, and Simulated Annealing. The proposed approach is empirically evaluated on a new set of benchmark instances. The computational results revealed that ALNS shows its clear advantage on the instances with the increasing number of vehicles, especially compared to commercial software, CPLEX.