[Back]

M. Schwengerer, S. Pirkwieser, G. Raidl:
"A variable neighborhood search approach for the two-echelon location-routing problem";
Talk: Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization (EvoCOP), Malaga, Spain; 2012-04-11 - 2012-04-13; in: "Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimisation - EvoCOP 2012", volume 7245 of LNCS (2012), ISBN: 978-3-642-29123-4; 13 - 24.

We consider the two-echelon location-routing problem (2ELRP),
a well-known problem in freight distribution arising when establishing
a two-level transport system with limited capacities. The problem
is a generalization of the NP-hard location routing problem (LRP), involving
strategic (location), tactical (allocation) and operational (routing)
decisions at the same time. We present a variable neighborhood
search (VNS) based on a previous successful VNS for the LRP, accordingly
adapted as well as extended. The proposed algorithm provides solutions
of high quality in short time, making use of seven di erent basic
neighborhood structures parameterized with di erent perturbation size
leading to a total of 21 speci c neighborhood structures. For intensi-
cation, two consecutive local search methods are applied, optimizing
the transport costs e ciently by considering only recently changed solution
parts. Experimental results clearly show that our method is at least
competitive regarding runtime and solution quality to other leading approaches,
also improving upon several best known solutions.

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_213208.pdf