A relaxation method for the three-dimensional loading capacitated vehicle routing problem

This paper addresses the three-dimensional loading capacitated vehicle routing problem which is strongly NP-hard for it generalizes two of the most well known NP-hard problems: the container loading problem and the vehicle routing problem. A relaxation method is proposed for solving the problem. In the proposed method, the loading constraint is replaced by the constraint of volume ratio, which greatly reduces the computing time. The method achieves excellent results for public available test cases with reasonable computing time.