Packing first, routing second—a heuristic for the vehicle routing and loading problem

The Vehicle Routing and Loading Problem (VRLP) results by combining vehicle routing, possibly with time windows, and three-dimensional loading. Some packing constraints of high practical relevance, among them an unloading sequence constraint and a support constraint, are also part of the VRLP. Different formulations of the VRLP are considered and the issue is discussed under which circumstances routing and packing should be tackled as a combined task. A two-stage heuristic is presented following a “packing first, routing second” approach, i.e. the packing of goods and the routing of vehicles is done in two strictly separated stages. High quality results are achieved in short computation times for the 46 VRLP instances recently introduced by Moura and Oliveira. Moreover 120 new large benchmark instances including up to 1000 customers and 50,000 boxes are introduced and results for these instances are also reported.