C. H. Robinson Uses Heuristics to Solve Rich Vehicle Routing Problems
This work addresses practical routing challenges for a logistics company, but it is incremental as it builds on existing set partitioning methods.
The authors tackled rich vehicle routing problems with complex constraints faced by C.H. Robinson by proposing a set partitioning framework with route generation algorithms, which outperformed existing technologies on 10 benchmark instances and were integrated into the company's platform.
We consider a wide family of vehicle routing problem variants with many complex and practical constraints, known as rich vehicle routing problems, which are faced on a daily basis by C.H. Robinson (CHR). Since CHR has many customers, each with distinct requirements, various routing problems with different objectives and constraints should be solved. We propose a set partitioning framework with a number of route generation algorithms, which have shown to be effective in solving a variety of different problems. The proposed algorithms have outperformed the existing technologies at CHR on 10 benchmark instances and since, have been embedded into the company's transportation planning and execution technology platform.