A new packing heuristic based algorithm for Vehicle Routing Problem with Three-dimensional Loading constraints

In this paper, we consider the Three-Dimensional Loading Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (3L-CVRP) which combines the routing of a fleet of vehicles and the loading of three dimensional shaped goods into vehicles while minimizing total travel distance. Compared with previous works which mainly focus on improving the performance of solving the routing problem, we propose a new least waste packing heuristic based approach for solving the loading subproblem, which is iteratively invoked by a simple tabu search algorithm for the routing. The proposed algorithm illustrates the state-of-the-art performance in terms of the solution quality and computational efficiency of our approach through the numerical experiments on the same test instances from literature.