A Heuristic Approach for the Swap-Body Vehicle Routing Problem

The Swap-Body Vehicle Routing Problem is a variant of the well-studied vehicle routing problem which incorporates additional complicating factors encountered in practice. In this problem, a homogeneous fleet of an unlimited number of trucks, semitrailers, and swap-bodies are used to serve a set of customers. Some customers may only be served by trucks due to a set of location-dependent accessibility constraints. Four types of operations (park, pickup, swap, and exchange) can be performed at designated swap locations, each with an associated time cost. The objective consists of fixed and variable costs for vehicle components involving service and swap action times. In this paper, we present a survey of related problems, and propose a local search based heuristic approach for this challenging problem. Computational results earned a place in the finals of a competition against nearly 30 teams of international researchers.