A hybrid population heuristic for the heterogeneous vehicle routing problems

The heterogeneous vehicle routing problem (HVRP) plays an important role in supply chain logistics. Two variants of HVRP are treated in this paper: one with fixed and variable costs (HVRPFD), and the other with only variable cost (HVRPD). A hybrid population heuristic that is able to solve both variants is proposed, in which a population of solutions are progressively evolved by crossovers and local searches. Computational results on a set of eight benchmark test problems from literature show that the proposed heuristic produces excellent solutions in short computing times.