A Hybrid Meta-Heuristic for the VRPTW with Cluster-Dependent Tour Starts in the Newspaper Industry

The newspaper industry implies a special optimization problem: Vehicle routes have to be executed directly after print finalization in order to supply customers in time. Hereby, the underlying vehicle routing problem with time windows has additional constraints: heterogeneous editions per vehicle and cluster-dependent tour starts due to differing completion times of editions.In this contribution, this problem is defined as a vehicle routing problem with time windows and cluster-dependent tour starts (VRPTWCD), caused by the allocation of editions to clusters and different edition completion times. This implicates the need for a new solution procedure. The well known methods Ant Colony Optimization and Tabu Search are combined and enhanced by additional parameters, resulting in a first approach (named AntTabu) for solving the VRPTWCD. This hybrid meta-heuristic, integrated in an application software for the newspaper industry, is applied to a real life application case of one of the largest newspaper companies in Germany.