A hybrid GRASP and tabu-search heuristic and an exact method for a variant of the multi-compartment vehicle routing problem

In this paper, we address a classical MCVRP variant characterized by a single vehicle type that has one exclusive compartment for each product type, fixed compartment sizes, limited total route time, and the fulfillment of all customer demands by a single vehicle on a single route. For this variant, we present a Tabu-Search-based metaheuristic hybridized with a GRASP method applied in the construction phase. We also present an exact algorithm for the problem. The proposed exact algorithm is a branch-and-cut-and-price coded within the VRPSolver framework. We apply our approaches to 237 benchmark literature instances. The results show that our heuristic approach presents a smaller average gap than all literature heuristics. Besides the exact approach outperforms the literature on exact methods and presents several optimal solutions for the first time.