A Reactive GRASP Algorithm for the Multi-depot Vehicle Routing Problem.

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a well know hard to solve problem in literature. In this paper, we describe a reactive greedy randomized adaptive search procedures algorithm, for short, reactive GRASP, using a variable neighborhood descent (VND) algorithm as local search procedure to solve the multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP). This algorithm, called RGRASP+VND, combines four distinct local search procedures and a clustering technique. The Cordeau et al. dataset, a widely well known MDVRP benchmark, is considered for the experimental tests. RGRASP+VND achieves better results on most small instances and a lower average solution for all instances on the experimental tests when compared to the earlier GRASP approaches in the MDVRP literature.