A simple and effective heuristic for periodic vehicle routing problem

The periodic vehicle routing problem (PVRP) consists in establishing a planning of visits to clients over a given time horizon so as to satisfy some service level while optimizing the routes used in each time period. A new, simple and effective heuristic algorithm has been developed for the PVRP that is a tour construction type procedure with an embedded improvement procedure. Computational results obtained from the test problems taken from the literature indicate that the algorithm compares well in terms of accuracy and execution time with other existing algorithms, finding a larger number of best solutions.