Tackling the Loading Aspect of the Vehicle Routing Problem with Compartments

We propose a new solution approach based on variable neighborhood search for routing problems having vehicles with multiple compartments and where several incompatibilities need to be respected. The introduced additions either directly deal with the packing of the vehicles or try to optimize the routing from a packing viewpoint. Results on a large set of available benchmark instances show the effectiveness of this method. We investigate the vehicle routing problem with compartments (VRPC) which has been tackled in the literature only very recently. We adhere to the definition of a rather general variant given by Derigs