A Route-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm for Large-Scale Vehicle Routing Problem

We present a new neighbor search algorithm named route-nearest neighbor (RNN) for searching the next node in large-scale vehicle routing problem (VRP). The RNN algorithm is used to divide the area customers into several routes. The key step in the route construction is how to search the next node (i.e., neighbor). Different from the Nearest Neighbor (NN) algorithm that search the neighbor of the current node, the RNN algorithm searches the neighbor of route. The objective of the route is to design a group of geographically closed customers within capacity. The experiments were carried out on a real dataset with 6772 tobacco customers. The results demonstrate that the RNN algorithm has better geographically closed customers than traditional NN algorithm.