A Hybrid Metaheuristic Algorithm for the Capacitated Location- Routing Problem

This paper presents a new metahaheuristic algorithm to solve the capacitated locationrouting problem (CLRP). We are given on input a set of identical vehicles, a set of depots with restricted capacities and opening costs, and a set of customers with deterministic demands. The problem consists of determining the depots to be opened, the customers and the vehicles to be assigned to each open depot, and the routes to be performed. The objective is to minimize the sum of the costs of the open depots, of the fixed cost associated with the used vehicles, and of the variable traveling costs related to the performed routes. In the proposed algorithm, a modified granular tabu search with different diversification strategies is applied. Computational experiments on benchmark instances show that the proposed algorithm is able to produce, within short computing time, several solutions obtained by the previously published methods and new best known solutions.