Adaptive large neighborhood search heuristics for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands and weight-related cost

Zhixing Luo, International Center of Management Science and Engineering, School of Management and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, PR China

Hu Qin, School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, No. 1037, Luoyu Road, Wuhan, PR China

Dezhi Zhang, School of Traffic & Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan 410075, China

Andrew Lim, Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, National University of Singapore 1, Engineering Drive 2, Singapore 117576, Singapore

ABSTRACT

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) with stochastic demands and weight-related cost is an extension of the VRP. Although some researchers have studied the VRP with either stochastic demands or weight-related cost, the literature on this problem is quite limited. We adopt the a priori optimization to tackle this problem and propose a dynamic programming to compute the expected cost of each route. We develop the adaptive large neighborhood search heuristics equipped with several approximate methods for the problem. To evaluate our heuristics, we generate 84 test instances. Computational results demonstrate the performance of our heuristics and can serve as benchmarks for future researchers.