A GRASP algorithm based new heuristic for the capacitated location routing problem

In this paper, the capacitated location-routing problem (CLRP) is studied. CLRP is composed of two hard optimisation problems: the facility location problem and the vehicle routing problem. The objective of CLRP is to determine the best location of multiple depots with their vehicle routes such that the total cost of the solution is minimal. To solve this problem, we propose a greedy randomised adaptive search procedure. The proposed method is based on a new heuristic to construct a feasible CLRP solution, and then a local search-based simulated annealing is used as improvement phase. We have used a new technique to construct the clusters around the depots. To prove the effectiveness of our algorithm, several LRP instances are used. The results found are very encouraging.