A well-scalable metaheuristic for the fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem with time windows

This paper presents an efficient and well-scalable metaheuristic for fleet size and mix vehicle routing with time windows. The suggested solution method combines the strengths of well-known threshold accepting and guided local search metaheuristics to guide a set of four local search heuristics. The computational tests were done using the benchmarks of [Liu, F.-H., & Shen, S.-Y. (1999). The fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem with time windows. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 50(7), 721-732] and 600 new benchmark problems suggested in this paper. The results indicate that the suggested method is competitive and scales almost linearly up to instances with 1000 customers.