2VRP: a benchmark problem for small but rich VRPs

We consider a 2-vehicle routing problem (2VRP) which can be viewed as a building block for the variety of vehicle routing problems (VRP). As a simplified version of the 2VRP, we consider a 2-period balanced travelling salesman problem (2TSP) and describe a polynomially solvable case of this NP-hard problem. For the 2VRP with general settings, we suggest a framework based on the Held and Karp dynamic programming algorithm. Our algorithms based on this framework show an exceptionally good performance on the published test data. Our approach can be easily extended to a variety of constraints/attributes in the VRP, hence the wording small but rich in the title of our paper. We also introduce a new methodological approach: we use easy solvable special cases for generating test instances and then use these instances in computational experiments.