Order matters - A Variable Neighborhood Search for the Swap-Body Vehicle Routing Problem

This article presents investigations on the performance of standard and problem specific neighborhood operators for the Swap-Body Vehicle Routing Problem. More specifically, our work analyzes the contribution of each operator to the solution quality. In addition, an experimental setting is defined that can be utilized to identify promising sequences in a Variable Neighborhood Search. The experiments verify that the sequence matters since two best known solutions can be equaled and 16 out of 18 solutions can be improved, with a maximal improvement of 2.25% and an average improvement of 0.70%.