Analyses of advanced iterated tour partitioning heuristics for generalized vehicle routing problems

Theoretical analyses of a set of iterated-tour partitioning vehicle routing algorithms applicable to a wide variety of commonly-used vehicle routing problem variants are presented. We analyze the worstcase performance of the algorithms and establish tightness of the derived bounds. Among other variants we capture the cases of pick-up and delivery, and multiple depots. We also introduce brand new concepts such as mobile depots, partitioning of customer nodes into groups, and potential opportunistic under-utilization of vehicle capacity by only partially loading the vehicle, among others, which arise from a printed circuit board application. The problems studied are of critical importance in many practical applications.