A memetic algorithm for the close-open mixed Vehicle Routing Problem

Nowadays in the transportation industry carriers reduce the costs through collaboration, e.g., sharing the assets and tasks with other collaborative partners. In this paper, an optimization problem called the Close-Open Mixed Vehicle Routing Problem (COMVRP) is discussed, that can be used to assist in identifying routes when a carrier serves the customers through his private vehicles and vehicles hired from external carriers. The objective of the problem is to minimize the fixed and variable costs for operating the private vehicles and the hired vehicles. A mix integer programming (MIP) model and an effective memetic algorithm are established for the COMVRP. Computational experiments are conducted. The results show that the proposed algorithm is able to produce high reasonable solutions within an acceptable running time, and always outperforms the robust MIP solver CPLEX.