A Multi - Start Local Improvement Heuristic

Assigning trips to the vehicles of a given fleet is known as the trip packing problem. Generally, each trip has a known duration and the working time of vehicles is limited and the fleet is composed of a limited number of non identical vehicles. This paper considers a special version of this problem we met in petrol products transportation. In this special version trip revenue depends on the vehicle selected to do it as vehicles have different capacities and configurations. The paper provides a mathematical formulation of the problem and proposes some simple local search heuristics to solve it. A set of benchmark problem instances is created and used to analyse the performance of the proposed heuristics.