A comparison of two meta-heuristics for the pickup and delivery problem with transshipment

In the Pickup and Delivery Problems (PDP), a set of routes satisfying requests between pickup and delivery nodes has to be found. This problem has applications in cargo transportation, mail deliveries, passenger transportation ... Recently, a new problem has arisen, the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Transshipment (PDPT), where requests can be transferred from a vehicle to another one in special nodes called transshipment nodes. In this paper, we propose two meta-heuristics to solve the PDPT. The first one is a Large Neighbourhood Search (LNS). The second one is a Genetic Algorithm (GA) which, as far as we know, has not yet been proposed to solve the PDPT. The objective of this paper is to compare the GA and the LNS with existing algorithms from the literature. To perform this comparison, benchmark instances from the literature are used. The GA outperforms the LNS and the existing solutions in the literature.