An advanced GRASP-HGA combination to solve a multi-period Pickup and Delivery Problem

This paper introduces an advanced GRASP-HGA combination for the multi-period Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows and Paired Demands (Mu-PDPTWPD). This variant is an extension of well-known pick up and delivery problem (PDP) where a fleet of vehicles must satisfy a given number of transportation requests subject to many constraints. We include the multi-period aspect to our variant to match real-world applications where sites can be visited by a vehicle in one or several periods. In this study, we aim at minimizing simultaneously the total traveled distance needed for vehicles to satisfy all requests and the penalty involved by serving a site lately. Computational results on benchmark instances are finally provided in order to show the efficiency of the proposed method. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.