A granular tabu search for the refrigerated vehicle routing problem with homogeneous fleet

The Refrigerated Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (RCVRP) considers a homogeneous fleet with a refrigerated system to decide the selection of routes to be performed according to customers' requirements. The aim is to keep the energy consumption of the routes as low as possible. We use a thermodynamic model to understand the unloading of products from trucks and the variables' efficiency, such as the temperature during the day influencing energy consumption. By considering various neighborhoods and a shaking procedure, this paper proposes a Granular Tabu Search scheme to solve the RCVRP. Computational tests using adapted benchmark instances from the literature demonstrate that the suggested method delivers high-quality solutions within short computing times, illustrating the refrigeration system's effect on routing decisions.

Quantum Walk-Based Vehicle Routing Optimisation

This paper demonstrates the applicability of the Quantum Walk-based Optimisation Algorithm (QWOA) to the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). Efficient algorithms are developed for the indexing and unindexing of the solution space and for implementing the required alternating phase-walk unitaries, which are the core components of QWOA. Results of numerical simulation demonstrate that the QWOA is capable of producing convergence to near-optimal solutions for a randomly generated eight location CVRP. Preparation of the amplified quantum state in this example problem is demonstrated to produce higher-quality solutions than expected from classical random sampling of equivalent computational effort.