No abstract

International audienceThis paper presents a two-phase method to solve a routing and scheduling problem that arises in public works. In this problem, the quantity of demands generally exceeds the capacity of a truck. As a result, demands have to be split into full truckloads, taking into account the various capacities in the heterogeneous fleet of vehicles that perform the transportation. Full truckload routes have to be designed and scheduled according to construction or loading constraints on pickup and delivery sites. In the first phase, we propose a linear program to split demands into full truckload requests. The second phase is a heuristic that solves a heterogeneous full truckload pickup and delivery problem with time windows and resource synchronization. The method is evaluated on instances from a real case study

Meta-analysis, a systematic statistical examination that combines the results of several independent studies, has the potential of obtaining problem- and implementation-independent knowledge and understanding of metaheuristic algorithms, but has not yet been applied in the domain of operations research. To illustrate the procedure, we carried out a meta-analysis of the adaptive layer in adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS). Although ALNS has been widely used to solve a broad range of problems, it has not yet been established whether or not adaptiveness actually contributes to the performance of an ALNS algorithm. A total of 134 studies were identified through Google Scholar or personal e-mail correspondence with researchers in the domain, 63 of which fit a set of predefined eligibility criteria. The results for 25 different implementations of ALNS solving a variety of problems were collected and analyzed using a random effects model. This dataset contains a detailed comparison of ALNS with the non-adaptive variant per study and per instance, together with the meta-analysis summary results. The data enable to replicate the analysis, to evaluate the algorithms using other metrics, to revisit the importance of ALNS adaptive layer if results from more studies become available, or to simply consult the ready-to-use formulas in the summary file to carry out a meta-analysis of any research question. The individual studies, the meta-analysis and its results are described and interpreted in detail in Renata Turkeš, Kenneth Sörensen, Lars Magnus Hvattum, Meta-analysis of Metaheuristics: Quantifying the Effect of Adaptiveness in Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search, in the European Journal of Operational Research.