A variable neighborhood search for the capacitated location-routing problem

In this work, we present a variable neighborhood search for solving a capacitated location routing problem with capacitated depots and a capacitated homogenous vehicle fleet in order to minimize the location and routing cost. We present the basic elements for this purpose and implement the variable neighborhood search algorithm using the variable neighborhood descent as the local search. We tested our heuristic approach on a large number of instances and the results were compared with the literature.