A deterministic tabu search algorithm for the fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem

The fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem consists of defining the type, the number of vehicles of each type, as well as the order in which to serve the customers with each vehicle when a company has to distribute goods to a set of customers geographically spread, with the objective of minimizing the total costs. In this paper, a heuristic algorithm based on tabu search is proposed and tested on several benchmark instances. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm produces high quality results within a reasonable computing time. Some new best solutions are reported for a set of test problems used in the literature. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.