The publication presents a novel solution approach for a complex vehicle routing problem in medium-sized transportation companies. The proposed model incorporates a wide range of real-world requirements, including heterogeneous vehicle fleets, trailers, time windows, loading equipment, capacity constraints, and labor regulations. By combining mathematical optimization with heuristic methods, the authors develop a powerful matheuristic that produces high-quality solutions within only a few minutes.
A particular strength of the work lies in its direct practical relevance. Rather than relying on artificial benchmark instances, the approach was developed and extensively validated using real operational data from a medium-sized logistics company in Germany. The results show that transportation costs can be reduced by an average of 16.7% compared to the company's previous manual route planning process, while maintaining short computation times and strong practical applicability.
The article is availabe here.
