A simple and effective evolutionary algorithm for the capacitated location–routing problem

•New chromosome representation and crossover operator for location–routing problems.•New evolutionary algorithm for solving the capacitated location–routing problem.•The proposed algorithm is able to obtain high quality results in short run times.

This paper proposes a hybrid genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the capacitated location–routing problem. The proposed algorithm follows the standard GA framework using local search procedures in the mutation phase. Computational evaluation was carried out on three sets of benchmark instances from the literature. Results show that, although relatively simple, the proposed algorithm is effective, providing competitive results for benchmark instances within reasonable computing time.