A hybrid metaheuristic approach for the rollon-rolloff vehicle routing problem

This paper discusses the rollon-rolloff vehicle routing problem, a sanitation routing problem in which large containers are left at customer locations such as construction sites and shopping centers. Customers dump their garbage into large waste containers and request for waste treatment services. Tractors then transport a container at a time between customer locations, disposal facility, and depot. The objective of the problem is to determine routes that minimize the number of required tractors and their deadhead time to serve all given customer demands. We propose a hybrid metaheuristic approach that consists of a large neighborhood search and various improvement methods to solve the problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by computational experiments using benchmark data. New best-known solutions are found for 17 problems out of 20 benchmark instances. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.