New benchmark instances for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

The recent research on the CVRP is being slowed down by the lack of a good set of benchmark instances. The existing sets suffer from at least one of the following drawbacks: (i) became too easy for current algorithms; (ii) are too artificial; (iii) are too homogeneous, not covering the wide range of characteristics found in real applications. We propose a new set of instances ranging from 100 to 1000 customers, designed in order to provide a more comprehensive and balanced experimental setting. We report results with state-of-the-art exact and heuristic methods.