Heuristic for Site-Dependent Truck and Trailer Routing Problem with Soft and Hard Time Windows and Split Deliveries

In this paper we develop an iterative insertion heuristic for a site-dependent truck and trailer routing problem with soft and hard time windows and split deliveries. In the considered problem a truck can leave its trailer for unloading or parking, make a truck-subtour to serve truckcustomers, and return back to take the trailer. This can be done several times in one route. In our heuristic every route is constructed by sequentially inserting customers to it in the way similar to Solomon’s (1987) approach developed for simple vehicle routes. Our contributions include: heuristic insertion procedure for complex truck and trailer routes with transshipment locations; efficient randomized mechanisms for choosing the first customer for insertion, for making time window violations, and for making split-deliveries; an improvement procedure shifting deliveries in a route to earlier time; an efficient approach dealing with sitedependency feature based on the transportation problem in case of arbitrary intersecting vehicle sets and a fast vehicle assignment procedure in case of nested vehicle sets.