Heuristic Approaches for the Fleet Size and Mix Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

T fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem with time windows (FSMVRPTW) is the problem of determining, at the same time, the composition and the routing of a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles aimed to serve a given set of customers. The routing problem requires us to design a set of minimum-cost routes originating and terminating at a central depot and serving customers with known demands, within given time windows. This paper develops a constructive insertion heuristic and a metaheuristic algorithm for FSMVRPTW. Extensive computational experiments on benchmark instances show that the proposed method is robust and efficient, and outperforms the previously published results.