A Hybrid GRASP+VND Heuristic for the Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing Problem Arising in City Logistics

The two-echelon vehicle routing problem (2E-VRP) is a variant of the classical vehicle routing problem (VRP) arising in two-level transportation systems such as those encountered in the context of city logistics. In the 2E-VRP, freight from a depot is compulsorily delivered through intermediate depots, named satellites. The first echelons are routes that distribute freight from depot to satellites, and the second are those from satellites to customers. This problem is solved by a hybrid heuristic which is composed of a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) with a route-first cluster-second procedure embedded and a variable neighborhood descent (VND), called GRASP