An Adaptable Variable Neighborhood Search for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Order Outsourcing

In practice, many package transportation companies lower their costs by hiring outside carriers to serve orders that cannot be served efficiently by their own trucks. The problem which takes the order outsource option into account is the Vehicle Routing Problem with Private Fleet and Common Carrier. In this variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem, orders are either delivered by an outside carrier, the common carrier, which receives an order specific price for this or by the own fleet, the private fleet, such that the total costs, which is the sum of the outside carrier costs and the delivery costs of the own fleet, is minimized. This paper presents two Adaptable Variable Neighborhood Search heuristics which are highly competitive and several new test instances which are based upon efficiency instead of necessity.