A two-level based genetic algorithm for solving the soft-clustered vehicle routing problem

The soft-clustered vehicle routing problem (Soft-CluVRP) is a relaxation of the clustered (CluVRP), which in turn variant generalized (GVRP). aim Soft-CluVRP to look for minimum cost group routes starting and ending at given depot set customers partitioned into priori defined, mutually exclusive exhaustive clusters, satisfying capacity constraints vehicles with supplementary property that all from same cluster have be supplied by vehicle. considered optimization NP-hard, why we proposed two-level based genetic algorithm order solve it. computational results reported on existing benchmark instances literature, prove our novel solution approach provides high-quality solutions within acceptable running times.