A tabu search heuristic for the heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing problem

The Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem (HVRP) is a variant of the classical Vehicle Routing Problem in which customers are served by a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles with various capacities, fixed costs, and variable costs. This article describes a tabu search heuristic for the HVRP. On a set of benchmark instances, it consistently produces high-quality solutions, including several new best-known solutions.