Vehicle routing problem with a heterogeneous fleet and time windows

In this paper, a problem variant of the vehicle routing problem with time windows is introduced to consider vehicle routing with a heterogeneous fleet, a limited number of vehicles and time windows. A method that extends an existing tabu search procedure to solve the problem is then proposed. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, experiments are conducted on a large set of test cases, which comprises several benchmark problems from numerous problem variants of the vehicle routing problem with a heterogeneous fleet. It is observed that the proposed method can be used to give reasonably good results for these problem variants. In addition, some ideas are presented to advance the research in heuristics, such as fair reporting standards, publication of benchmark problems and executable routines developed for algorithmic comparison.